Ask HN: Any web startups using Java?

Java EE is an excellent development platform for any kind of web application. Its just a shame that everyone seems to assume its very difficult to implement.

I'm by no means a hugely experienced developer but after spending a short time working for an organisation that use Java EE extensively I now have learnt how to use and deploy pretty much the whole EE spectrum - Servlets, JSPs, Web Services, EJBs, JMS etc. That provides a huge arsenal for scalable web application development.

I think the reasons Java tends not to be used in the web app world and PHP / RoR not in the corporate world is down to the backgrounds of the developers. Web developers who come from a freelance web site building background are more familiar with PHP - its a very consumable technology for people that haven't got a lot of time to invest in learning technologies. Career software developers often are trained in Java development on the job once they graduate (from a degree which will likely have had a large Java component).

I personally don't know much about PHP, but I see the most likely platform to be future proof as Ruby on Rails. But for now I'm sticking with Java, it still has a fairly substantial future.

We used JBoss SEAM when we built the infrastructure for our startup back in 07. It worked very nice, it was much faster to work with than other frameworks I've used. In the end we failed but it wasn't because of Java. I think...

My startup http://www.onmydoorstep.com.au/ is Java/Wicket/Guice/Lucene based.

Java's greatest strength is it's speed, a dearth of open-source libraries for pretty much anything you'd need. It's very possible to write light-weight simple code, if you shift out of the enterprise mind-set.

I don't believe the second one works. Usually you'd define a method using:

  def some_method
    # do something
  end

Usually you'll only use do after a method that's already defined, in order to pass a block of code to it.

I did my lonely venture in java. I think the main problem of java for startups is that it's uncool. They're trying to rationalize, but they are wrong, you avoid wearing a tie to express that you're not a number, I don't know why you wouldn't avoid java as a statement that you're not an IBM consultant.

When I started my project, I tried ruby, but after 2 months of fighting, I just went back to java. But somehow I'm gifted, I never did java at bigco, I did it at another (desktop) startup before and have a critical eye on the java current trends. I don't use Spring and all the famous bigco frameworks, I use a simple setup (PicoStuff, jetty, Webworks).

But in think most "objective arguments agains java in a startup" are plain wrong. The real problem of java is that all people know about it is eclipse and spring and the EJB2.

edit: BTW, today I do PHP, and we're integrating with drupal, and what I see in drupal is far worse than the EJB spec. It's tangled and static so you can't test anything in isolation, and there is no spec. The core code is really difficult to read because everything is passing maps of string around.