[John Rogers]

Some things to consider when selecting what language to use is the life of the language and how the company support is. As an example, the last company I worked at before I retired in Jan. of 2009 had an excellent aircraft maintenance and management system. I used Oracle databases which are great for security on high transaction systems, Oracle Forms which as I noted was pretty much developed to provide the necessary interface to the users and Apache Tomcat with HTTPS for fairly secure comms between users and the application server. We had about 1900 forms or screens and 450 reports which all had been blessed by the FAA. Soooooo, a couple of new VPs came in and both were so hot on open source software you could not stand close to them!!! The convinced the CEO to do a switch to JAVA for the front end and MySQL for the database and they weren't sure what to use for client connections yet. At a meeting we had with all our programmers, support folks, DBA (me) and the sysadmin an estimate was worked up to give a time frame for conversion. Never mind NONE of the programmers had programmed in JAVA but they said it could be done in a year or less! That works out to around 7 forms a day and since each one has a couple thousand lines of PLSQL/C++/etc behind them AND there was not software that can convert that to JAVA, at the end of the first six months there were 4 forms converted and at the end of a year 6 more! By that time the customers had found out what was happening and all bailed, including me, who retired!