Ben, Don,
I agree strongly that aD seem to be 'getting it' more and more, though perhaps still with a little way to go. And the redesign of 4.0 so far looks really good. I still think they could have gone a little further in putting Oracle specific stuff behind an interface (as they did with (e.g. db_sysdate, db_nextval) - see my other posts.
On aD and Java: (from Lars)
Why do we work in Java at all? Bottom line is that potential clients laugh
at us when we say Tcl. They want to see Java. Also, there are lot more
libraries and a lot more Java developers than there are Tcl, and, most
importantly, Java is improving at a much faster pace than Tcl is. We've had
to escape into Java at times, to get to the libraries we need (e.g. email
MIME parsing, LDAP client). We'll most likely never have to go the other way
around: escape into Tcl to get things done from Java.