Recently I've been pondering the thought of trying to create a new system for the casino industry. I currently work as a slot attendant at a casino and twice in the last 2 weeks our slot detection system(SDS) has gone down.

Let me explain a little about this system from what I understand of it. Every slot machine in the casino is on the lan and is connected to the AS400 servers that run the SDS. There is a standard protocol for each machine that tells the AS400 servers whats going on. If the machine is out of coins it sends signal A. If the machine has hit a jackpot it sends signal B. etc... Now the AS400 servers are also hooked up to the database which tracks all the customers play who insert their card into the machine. If the customer puts X amount of dollars in the machine they get Z amount of comps into their account. The database also holds the standard information for a customer (i.e. Name, address, phone, etc.)

Because this system is proprietary software its extremly unstable and the support is bad. The company that designs this software has a monoply on the market and frankly their is no alternative out there.

I'd like to design a Linux based system to do all these functions as a little project of mine to do on the side. My question is what programming language I should use that would work well in this type of environment. I'm aware that this can be done using a variety of languages but I believe some would be better suited for this application then others due to the complexity of this software.

What programming languange would you suggest?

Are you sticking to the AS400s?

Well, if you are limited to using AS400s then you're pretty much stuck with whatever's on the system. Like CL or COBOL. Fortunately, IBM is really into Java these days and you can do some cool stuff with Java on the AS400.

Ideally it would run on a linux system. My whole goal is to get them to move away from the AS400 systems.

Personally i would stay on the AS400s, but if you want to move to linux, pretty much any language will do. C/C++, Python, Perl, Java, etc... It's really up to you to work with a language that you know well and is easy to use for you.

The key here i think is security. You want to make your whole system as secure as possible. The AS400s give you a bit of that.