As an example, Sungard HE's Banner (built on Oracle) is used extensively as the ERP system at many universities in the United States. It is used for billing, payroll, recruitment, grades, student and employee contact data, etc. It is non-functional without the Java browser plugin.
Is there a reason that Sungard HE can't handle the browser portion using JS or similar instead of JPI? No. But it would be a very slow migration process and, basically, all employees at many major universities would be stuck with older Java versions.
This is just one example that I'm (unfortunately) intimately familiar with. I'm sure there are many others that the typical HN crowd (small shops, latest technology, devops, etc) would never see.
Is there a reason that Sungard HE can't handle the browser portion using JS or similar instead of JPI? No. But it would be a very slow migration process and, basically, all employees at many major universities would be stuck with older Java versions.
This is just one example that I'm (unfortunately) intimately familiar with. I'm sure there are many others that the typical HN crowd (small shops, latest technology, devops, etc) would never see.