Having worked with both Perl and Java on multiple platforms (although not for heavy graphics stuff), I'd say their portability is about the same. As corion said, it's possible to write both portable and non-portable programs in both languages.

One of the benefits of Java is having some money behind it. I'm serious. I work with with databases a lot so I can use JDBC and DBI to compare. DBI is faster (much faster in some cases) and simpler to use. But JDBC offers much richer access to metadata which can be extremely important for portability. IMO, a big reason for this is Sun's muscle -- probably a bigger reason is the wider market for JDBC drivers, but that just illustrates the point.

The companies and money behind Java also enable the various working groups to come out with some (again, IMO) really thoughtful APIs. For instance, JMS (Java Message Service) is just an interface but since vendors want to have a Java interface and they want to be 'compliant' (however that's defined), then they'll typically implement most or all of the interface. For a developer, this kicks ass. It's like all the good parts about developing for Windows without being (necessarily) constrained to a single vendor. Yes, Sun is kind of that "single vendor" but the things I've been working with (Servlets, J2EE, JMS, JDBC) they've really seemed to work with industry and the folks who are using the technology to make things easier.

If something like this existed for Perl I'd be in nirvana. :-) As it is, developing with Java is generally more of a pain than developing with Perl -- the easy things in Java aren't always easy.

Chris
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