Let me preface this by saying I'm a pretty inexperienced Java programmer (I fancy myself as intermediate, and I'm working through Effective Java and Filthy Rich Clients). I'm doing pretty good with making standalone Java applications. That being said, I got a sort of side project at work.
I was approached at work (because I'm a computer science major) about building an application that does some searching of the organization. Essentially it allows the user to create and edit an n-ary tree, save the tree, load the tree, and then it conducts a (quasi) randomized selection of the nodes of the tree (with some exclusions of historical data), and displays the details of the associated object. The details of the code aren't incredibly important except to say that it includes:
- Data structures
- Generics
- a GUI interface
- Saving/loading
Because I was approached in a way that people weren't actually expecting a product, the web development lead said, "do it in Java, since that's what you know." (I actually work in middle management of the network field techs, so I'm not really a part of the development team) Two weeks of spending all of my off time and I got it ready to go. But the problem that I discovered is this: <complain>The network doesn't allow a JRE to happen, or a JVM, or a Java anything except for the fact that it's installed for no reason and essentially disabled. No .jars, no JWS, no applets, not even a wrapped .exe file that counts on the JVM being there.</complain> So what would the experts here recommend?
Is there a way to port this over to a web something (my web development skills are in their infancy)? What is the best place to go to learn about how to do this? Is there a web-based object oriented language in which I can build data structures (or it has a library) such as linked-lists, trees, and hash maps? If I make it into a standalone executable, then it will take months to get approved for deployment on the network and they would like to have it much sooner than that, so that option is out.
What do you think would be the best way to bring this over to something web-based that does not require Java in any way, shape, or form? Or do I need to learn a new language and re-develop the whole thing? (about 4000 lines of code)
Thanks in advance,
Luc