What has happened since my last posting?
JAVA
At work I am now dealing with creating the GUI using JAVA. I was the C++ advocate in the preceding discussion, voting for either QT/GTK+ in case of a cross platform approach and MSVC++ in case we just want to have Win32 covered.
While I was quite unhappy with the decision (because I prefer an efficient language like C++), I must admit that JAVA has a very good 2D library. I must also admit that JBuilder looks like a very fine IDE, it might be comparable in power to MS Developer's studio. (OK I am an Emacs devotee but still that stuff looks impressive)
Do we have a similiar powerful and portable lib for C++? QT looks good, but lacks a lot of the 2d features that JAVA offers and it is only available to commercial developes under Win32. About the latest GTK+ I am not sure, for example it seems to offer alpha channels and antialiasing, but I don't have checked that. GTK+ never came into closer consideration because of its lack of commercial support under Win32. And I am just talking graphics. I mean whoever talks about JAVA's power, in fact talks about the huge libraries. It is a shame that there is no comparable library for C++.
Do we have a full grown ISO C++ compiler that is efficient and portable? I am not sure if GNU C++ fits that shoe.
Also there is no force in the C++ world, probably except Microsoft, that could play a similiar role to that what SUN plays for JAVA. And Microsoft isn't pro platform portability at all. So who should do the necessary dirty work?
OODB
We have a very complex domain model at work that cries for an object oriented database. But why the heck, the existing ones are so poor?
Right now only Objectivity or Versant seem to be the only grown up OODBs, but both of them suffer from having hard to swallow constraints.
I really wonder what will arrive first, a popular usable distributed OOP supporting operating system, or an usable OODB. Both would have to create distributed adress spaces, lookup services and a lot of other goodies.