I think we have tried everything except the sacrifice of a virgin goat by midnight. We still have a data collector running with only one thread that crashes too often to be comfortable with.
A freebsd-compiled Kaffe should not just crash, and if it does it should be able to debug it like any other C program (turn on debug logging in Kaffe, inspect the core dump file, run it in the debugger etc). Especially after we switched to the java-snmp package my hope is that we should not have any dependencies which precludes Kaffe from working.
Our main problem with Java is that we have not enough knowledge about the language to be at any help with debugging. Hence the wish for something more familiar and with more FreeBSD support.
This is the one valid argument against Java I can agree to; unfortunately sysadmin people do not have much experience with Java, despite my opinion that Java is very appropriate for this kind of back-end work. Hopefully Morten will be able to assist a lot more this year if he starts working on NAV full-time.
-- Kristian