It feels to me that this whole topic has gotten side-tracked. I think you first need to decide what you want to build before you decide on technologies. Are you building a web application or a desktop? Of course, there might be technology that lets you do both, to some degree. As far as I know, the only viable language for web applications is Javascript, unless you want to build browser plugins. While there might be more variety in desktop applications, the usefulness might be more limited - but maybe not. After all, there are still a whole lot of desktop based tools around.
But then you have apps like Microsoft Office where they have built a web version and a Windows desktop version and a Mac OS desktop version. I have no idea how much, if any, of that code is shared, but again, that is an option that could be considered. So again, before going down the rabbit hole of technology discussion, what is the scope of what the next version of Chainsaw will be? Will it be an upgraded version of the existing code base that uses something besides Swing, will it be something else, or do we want multiple spin-off projects? Ralph
