On Fri, May 25, 2007 at 05:06:35PM -0500, Przemys?aw Pawe?czyk wrote:
> 4) If not Java then which language within *BSD world provides cross
> platform software interoperability: Windows - Linux - BSD - Mac?

If you just want command line, then lots of things will get you
there, but you'll need to be able to build on each of them.  If
you have each platform available, with appropriate dev tools,
then ANSI/ISO C can work just fine.

If you don't want to build on the different platforms, or want a
GUI, then you're a bit limited to interpreted languages of some
sort.

Some alternatives I've used or seen used with varying degrees of
success:

Python + wxPython
(I suspect that there's probably also a Ruby + wxWindows...)
Python + Tk
TCL + Tk
PLT Scheme
Java (Sun's JDK isn't the only game in town if you're writing
your own code: Kafe and Sable are quite nice.  I believe that
both are capable of running Eclipse, if that's worth anything.)

There's Mono if you feel inclined to C#.

If you have the dev environment and can build for each target,
then C++ + wxWindows or C++ + Qt will get you quite a long way.

I believe that GNOME/Gtk and the associated shooting match is
working towards becoming cross-platform, but I haven't tried to
wrestle that particular greased pig yet...

And the coming tsunami is to run the application on your server
and write a GUI in javascript so that users can point their web
browser at it.  There's a near-infinite number of half-finished
frameworks for doing this, although I've heard good things about
the google toolkit.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew