Ask HN: Any web startups using Java?

mint.com is/was another one

That's the choice I made: http://bens.me.uk/2010/jruby-in-practice

It works very well. You get close to the performance of C code in a 'safe' language, but can write the non-performance-critical code in a less verbose language of your choice.

Java tools are often for-enterprise, and the best of them are often for-purchase.

Tweaking a Java library is huge PITA, because Java is soooo code-heavy. I estimate Java leads to ~10x as many lines of code when compared to Ruby or Python for basic libraries like API clients. The IDE-reliance inherent in that culture removes many of the immediate incentives of code minimalism, and as such, you often find insanely convoluted libraries that literally have more classes than pieces of functionality.

Java's great if you're not in a hurry, or if your organization is infected with enough bureaucracy that the added bureaucracy in the code won't even make a dent in your already-dismal efficiency, or if you need to "get fat" (i.e. "hire a bunch of college grads and burn them out") and you don't mind dropping your talent density to near-zero figures.

With all talent being equal, give me a Python or Ruby shop over a Java shop any day, and I'm certain they will be significantly more productive, day in and day out.

We are a London Startup, mainly building products off the back of web crawling & data mining, using Java for all our development, whether web or server-side. As our web framework we use Tapestry5, which is a great framework, with fast development times & minimal coding (Howard Lewis Ship has really put a lot of thought into the development of the T5 framework). Server side our crawl infrastructure, and other application processes are all Java. We use hundreds of Java open source libraries, including HBase, Lucene & OpenJPA. Addressing your issues 1) Lack of hosting support - we hire VPS, cloud or dedicated server infra on which we can deploy whatever we want - I don't see how this could be an issue. Even a cheap $10/month VPS gives you root these days 2) Performance issues? I won't get into a performance discussion but unless you've got google levels of traffic it's not worth worrying too much whatever platform/language you choose, a bigger challenge early on is attracting customers ;-) I used to work in banking & Java was performant enough for our high frequency trading infrastructure, where performance really does matter. 3) We have been going 2.5 years now, a lot of what we do is server-side processing and data munching and the open source Java libraries we leveraged along the way really helped us get going, things like HBase, Lucence, Bdb, Natural Language Processing (OpenNLP), Neural Nets (Encog), Stats packages, HTML processing (Jericho, JTidy). I know there are API's and ports of these in other languages, but the Java open source community is enormous, just because it's been around for so long, so it's always easy to find someone who'se done it before.

EDIT (Summary): We knew Java well early on and so used it to prove a market, leveraging open source libraries along the way. Do I think Java the language was a particular competitive advantage to us? No. But do I think any of PHP, Ruby or Python would have been either? No. (Lisp - probably yes! but we don't know it well enough to use professionally). To be honest, our main concern early on is to release early and prove the market, with whatever tools we can use.