[Zhiroc]

At my place of work, we have a 75K line Java application we use for a key business application. It's pretty rock solid, in that it doesn't crash, it doesn't corrupt data, and it performs pretty well. It's written for Java 1.4.2 (which is somewhere in the vicinity of 5-6 years old now), and runs on 1.5 or 1.6 too. The concern about versions is overblown.

As for readability, I find it not as readable as C (which is a pretty clean language for the most part), but more readable than C++. Though I don't count readability all that high, I guess. I love Perl, and it is only one small step up from APL or TECO (there, I've dated myself...)

I don't see anything wrong with writing the core application in one language, and then imbedding a scripting language in another. zMUD and mushclient both do this. Having thought about this before, I also had an inclination that doing this shields the application itself from some malicious or just erroneous scripting. If you implement your scripting in the same language as the client, I think I'd want to see some pretty good sandboxing between them.

As for scripting for Java applications, I came across this web page: . I haven't looked too carefully though. I think some might be based on native code, making the cross-platform advantage less so. But I think some are pure Java implementations of the scripting engines.

If a user needs to install Java to run a client, I don't see that as too onerous a requirement. After all, other than raw telnet, no OS comes with a MUD client pre-installed. And once you install the core JRE, you can use Java web start to download the client itself, and keep it up to date. I think that works very well.