If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library). http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ http://code

If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library). http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ We really like the support for higher-order functions, like Iterables.transform (aka map) and Functions.compose amongst others. There are loads of useful tools including MapMaker, which is great for building caches. The downside is that Function<X,Y> is an interface and implementations are often inner classes, which can be syntactically quite messy. We've recently open-sourced our common library, which extends Guava with a few additional features we've found useful: http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/metabroadcast/common/ http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/...