>>Hi Metin,
>>
>>In my opinion, you should choose a language for whatever reason makes you comfortable with the choice. It's a matter of personal preference and after all's been said and done, most languages will be suitable for most applications.
>>
>>However (also my opinion), I think that java's motto of platform independence is a smoke curtain. Is it great? Sure! From a novelty point of view, absolutely. Is it useful? Hardly.
>>
>>Let me bring this into perspective. Today I'd dare to say that 99% of the world runs on the wintel platform. Why would the fact that Java can run on the other 1% bear any weight in my decision for a programming language? Granted, some situation may call for this, but those are really FRINGE cases, and it's just fortunate for developers involved with those that they have an alternative, but aside from that, for all practical purposes, and in light of what platform the world at large uses, it's insignificant.
>>
>
>What you say is true for the desktop but not for the server market. On that market, Wintel is not 99% and thus it makes a lot of sense to use Java there.

If you're developing something for the server market, you know what platform you're targetting and I'm sure there are other tools better suited than Java.

Either way, if you know what your target platform is, why choose a language based on the fact that it's platform independent? It makes no sense to have that fact bear ANY weight on the decision.

Platform-independence was touted by Sun as a panacea to solve a problem that up to then, no one mentioned at all. It's simple marketing: create fear in the mind of your potential market and you will indeed create a market.

From what I hear, Java is a pure Object Oriented language. That's a nice feature and that should be reason enough to use it. In my opinion, this whole thing with Java being platform-independent and hence the "most suitable solution" seems to me as an entirely artificial scenario.

It's been nearly 10 years of this nonsense. Sun profetized thin clients everywhere. A lot of people jumped in saying "yeah, that's the way to go", yet, now when we look at the way browser apps work, most of them require active-x controls, specific versions of IE or whatever browser the developer likes, and in some cases, specific OS versions. If anyone calls this platform-independence I AM a flying pig.

Java is a nice language, but I strongly believe that it's been given far more importance than it deserves. The media turned a blind eye to the facts and so seems to have happened to the development community at large.

Alex