Why Java?

I needed something which would run on Unix and Windows because APM is buggy on my notebook (Linux freezes upon resume and ACPI is not yet available) and I'm forced to use Win2K for the time being because I need the suspend/resume functionality. Other than that, I prefer Unix environments and spend 90% of my Windows time in Cygwin....

I didn't use C (usually my first choice) simply because I wanted to do something different this time and also didn't want to recompile the program for multiple platforms each time I change something.

After starting the project in Python (which is a very nice script language with outstanding performance) and wxWindows as GUI toolkit, I remembered I needed to get into Java anyway so I took this as an opportunity to get up to speed with Java.

The project started in Borland's JBuilder, an excellent tool to get into Java programming, but this might change in the future in favor of a makefile-based approach.

In the meantime, I switched to SunONE because of Borland's insistance of submitting personal data for upgrades. I have yet to change the GUI code to match what SunONE requires but will probably come up with some self-made approach which looks better in the source code. Something like an array of GUI objects which will be processed by a helper class to produce decent dialogs.

I'm more of a traditional, procedural type of programmer so the source is probably not perfect in the eyes of OOP advocates but it does the job and I think I found an acceptable balance between OOP and procedural programming.