My plan was to develop with Ruby on Rails but I was told that I must used one of the traditional programming languages and the bulk of the coding (70%) must be done with that programming language. This is where I have the problem. I have set out constraints for this project, one of which is OS independence. As far as I can see right now Java is my only way out but developing with java seems so complicated and I don't find Sun's website very helpful. It does not give a good overview of things. For instance I found out about the Java Image Management Interface but then I don't know how to add this java tool kit to my xcode project so that xcodes links to the classes in that toolkit for compilation. I am feeling overwhelmed with the inability to get strait forward information. There are always stacks and stacks fo materials to read most of which have nothing to do with what you're interested in.