> > this may mean, people who do this must work with a patched JDK in the > future. >
Right. But I think that's going to be more and more common in future. If you rely on people installing proprietary stuff like JWS or applets then it's a bleak future, as the way forward is clearly bundled JREs. At some point I suspect someone will make a kind of "WebStart Next Generation" without Oracle and start distributing a custom build of OpenJDK + their own platform/distribution stuff. For example, a JRE that updates itself via Omaha on Windows would clearly be superior to Oracle's solution: https://code.google.com/p/omaha Combined with a more modern app store like approach rather than JNLP or applets and that'd be a winner, I think.