A question

[Attila Lendvai (101)]

Hi!

I have a question for the knowledgeable people here about choosing the
right language for a project. I would be very happy if you could comment
on this...

We are about to write an online strategy game, and we are evaluating
different architectures. Our current winner is EJB, but it's due to our limited knowledge of
other architectures. We are building an extensive specification in XML and are planning to generate a very big
percent of the code from that. (a few totally generated layers, fine grained authentication, etc.
which is a must have if we go with Java) But it's obvious that Java is not the absolute winner... The
server could be written in any language that can give us the following:

- scalability (distributed environment, load balancing, or easily
implementable with the given libs)
- some kind of OOP support
- component library (collections, logging, etc.)
- macros, HOF's, etc...
- enough support behind it, preferably free softwares, should run on Linux
- multi user, transactional, transparent persistency of objects (ODBMS,
RDBMS?) (we can hack it in Java with OJB (stores and loads Java object graphs to/from an RDBMS))
- rmi over http (the possibility to connect the server somehow and the
Java client, a thin Java layer is ok on the server)

We were currently looking at Common LISP, and found some answer to most of
the above, but it's not enough to start a project based on that (which dialect, etc...). So if you
could drop some ideas which language to use we would be grateful (If we get rich, we'll support
Tunes! :)

Thanks in advance,

- 101.