[vworld-tech] Modern MUD server design

[Ryan Daum]

Just to pipe in here..

IMHO, Java remains a decent language for what it was designed for -- 
Internet-hosted business applications that run in a fairly restricted 
environment, with garbage collection that you don't have to worry about, 
a set of web-related services and libraries, application servers that 
provide hosting for such services, decent database connectivity, and a 
lot of third party APIs, JDBC drivers and various libraries to connect 
with other similar business apps.

What it does excel at is anything that requires you do anything 
non-traditional that a MOO-like MUD or an MMORPG might reuqire: handling 
orthogonal persistence to something other than a relational Db, hosting 
thousands of simultaneous network connections (tho with Java 1.4's NIO, 
this has probably improved), writing safe runtime extensions (loading a 
class into a sandbox doesn't feel sufficient for my purposes, but it may 
for others).

I could be wrong, but I work in Java all day and although I like my IDE 
(IntelliJ), I can't say I like the language.  At all.

There are a lot of hungry Java programmers, though, so maybe that's an 
advantage to using it.  And, like Bruce mentioned, the tools are pretty 
good.

Ryan