41–50 of 164 posts
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There are lots of great frameworks for ColdFusion/Railo.
ColdFusion is not associated with fun development, may be I'm wrong, but for me it is associated with plenty of config xmls and other enterpricy stuff.
Java is great for rapid development once the development process is set up correctly. I've actually ported the app to Google App Engine in the middle of development once I learned of its generous hosting plan. Java is one of the two languages supported by GAE. I did use Python for quick scripts in import/export and building up data sets from dev environment to production servers.
I believe that one of the reason is lack of good web-applications framework for quick development. There is nothing like django or rails, so if you need to have non-trivial application created in minimum time java is not the best platform. In case when your team consists of plenty different skill level developers java is much safer platform. Performance of the application and hosting is not a problem. Hosting of java…
I used to think so as well but now there is a great framework called Play: http://www.playframework.org/
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//bloated enterprise stuff// by this you mean the frameworks like Spring, Struts or the buzzwords like JMS, EJBs?
i guess stuff like EJB, JMS. Spring is kinda lightweight compared to those frameworks/platforms.
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J2EE and J2SE are also solid platforms...
but only the enterprise developers seems to be caring about Java platforms. Freelancers / hackers rarely use Java.
I've be very scared of a web startup that chose Java over Python or Ruby. Why subject yourself to Java? RoR and Django are both solid platforms (among others).
I'm just working on my web startup using Groovy and Grails and many things I need are provided out of the box or through plugins (security, search) that are easy to install, configure and use.
I think you should consider platforms as a whole and not just the languages.
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Depends on what you mean by freelancers. There's an impression that RoR is the language of choice for hackers because so many web-apps are built by it. Web consulting firms use Java all the time because it's a proven technology with tons of flexibility. In RoR, the moment you step outside of the conventional MVC model; you are pretty much hosed, you have to write from scratch a lot of stuff that folks in Java have al…
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 conv…
We've deployed a reasonable sized startup codebase for our project without paying a dime for tools and libraries.
Plus, we were also able to carry our Java coding skills across into our Android mobile app development.
I think there are pros and cons to most languages.
I'm a long term Python developer (since the 1.5.2 days). I've used a lot of different languages so far (from C to Haskell), and I've always avoided Java in the past (at the beginning because it was slow, later because everyone was telling me how bloated it is).
But using Java EE (!) instead of Python for a project a few months ago was really an enlightenment. Yes, it is somewhat bloated (although much less in the recent versions where you can use annotations instead of all those XML files). But on the other hand: It just works - exactly as documented.
With all other frameworks (based on Python, Ruby, etc.) that I've used so far I had to hack around in the framework or in the libraries to make it work the way I want. This starts with simple issues such as Unicode support, where the authors of a library obviously just didn't care if it works, and continues with distributed transactions, where you have to hack up the whole logic inside your application because the framework doesn't support them. Compared to this, with Java (EE) this just works rock stable and has most of the features you'll ever need.
From a performance perspective Java isn't that bad as either. For a project I've compared the performance of two simple (comparable) Web apps that I've wrote: One with Python on Django, the other one with Java on Glassfish). Once you increase the concurrency, the requests to the Django app just return error codes or take a long time to complete. In comparison, the Glassfish app just chucks happily along.
This does not mean that Java is appropriate for all use cases. But just don't believe the majority and try out yourself, if it works for you.
If your observation is based on reading HN, likely it's a bit skewed. Paul Graham has bashed Java and Java programmers quite a bit in his writings: "The programmers you'll be able to hire to work on a Java project won't be as smart as the ones you could get to work on a project written in Python."
That said, I would have to agree that Java is not the language of choice for small startups. There is a lot of overhead involved in setting up a Java project compared to other languages/platforms, and the problems that Java is best at solving aren't usually the problems you run into in a small web app (unless you're dealing with a lot of data).
Java isn't as fun to use as newer languages, and doesn't have the vibrant community that Ruby and Python do (even if you include JVM based languages like Scala and Groovy). Java doesn't attract creative types. A web designer looking to pick up a first backend programming language is probably not going to choose Java, and thus they aren't going to create beautiful documentation repositories, fun open source projects, organize meetups, or create the next revolutionary social app.
However, there is a reason that so many large startups start to lean on Java once they reach scale. Java is fast, encourages good design, and is great for large development teams.