If you wanted to distribute a program to as many OS as much as possible what’s the best language to use?
I’m considering user’s convenience here. For example, they don’t need to download java run time, flash or .net framework if they don’t have it. Also once they download it, they don’t need to compile it themselves.
I’m also considering developer’s convenience, in that on one compile, the program compiles different version of OS for you and you don’t need to install different os to compile it.
Here are the features of the program I’m thinking:
Stores text and image to database
Uses keywords
Can browse information in the webserver via xml
Can share(upload and download) information from the web server via xml
Can compile and edit related articles via keywords
It’s something like a blog with advance features and can exist on and offline
Both Java and Python would do the job. IMHO, Python would do it in a nicer way and would make you happier, especially if you are coming from a C-like language. Java would probably be faster, unless you do some horrible programming.
There are tools (e.g. JSmooth) which will quite effortlessly convert a Java app to a Windows executable, and would even include JRE. Your user would just have to double-click. There are also several applications for creating Mac executables from a Jar file, the name slipped my mind. A colleague did that at work recently.
The same holds for Python too.