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Theres an ever growing list at http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy
#1 reason: Java is a verbose language with a rather verbose design philosophy/ecosystem which is not to say it's bad. it's actually really good, with lots of great qualities. but compared to PHP, Ruby and Python, it's rather verbose. As a general rule you can pound out way more feature points per hour in a less verbose language than a more verbose one. there are other factors, sure, but I think this is the biggest on…
You're perpetuating a myth. Verbosity doesn't equal less productivity. I would be really surprised if anyone here said their bottleneck in programming was the speed they can type. Also, all languages have their needless verbosity - look at 'end' vs '}' (ruby vs java). Which is the more verbose?
Follow up question: Any startups using Scala? Based on my observation, some heavy hitters are using Scala in production, but the learning curve is high and development time is slower that PHP, RoR or Python.
And I think Twitter is using Scala.
I sold a Java-based program for about four years and have a previous background in Big Freaking Enterprise Java Web Development. You can certainly write web applications in Java. They're harder to deploy than PHP but easier to deploy than Rails, in my experience, depending heavily on how experienced you are at administering systems and how much Java enterprise coffee you want to drink. Java is a mature language. Libr…
There is play framework, which is very good and comparable to RoR.
Play is seriously, seriously good. We used to build on top of a fairly heavy but powerful stack of Spring, Hibernate and Struts2/Wicket (depending on the app). Although there's a lot of power there there's also a lot of tangled XML and you need to do a fair amount of gymnastics to get through it all. Server restarts are common and painful. Getting exception stacks that run 200 classes deep are IMHO a bad sign.
Play is a total breath of fresh air. REALLY well thought out, clean, simple, fast:
- almost no server restarts needed, - runs very very quickly in production - stateless, so zero downtime deployments are trivial - great community - extendable with modules
Then there are all the little things. Libraries to do things like encryption and image resizing are built in and just work. Everything just works.
I can't recommend it enough. It really does liberate Java from the Enterprise shackles.
I sold a Java-based program for about four years and have a previous background in Big Freaking Enterprise Java Web Development. You can certainly write web applications in Java. They're harder to deploy than PHP but easier to deploy than Rails, in my experience, depending heavily on how experienced you are at administering systems and how much Java enterprise coffee you want to drink. Java is a mature language. Libr…
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 applicat…
Follow up question: Any startups using Scala? Based on my observation, some heavy hitters are using Scala in production, but the learning curve is high and development time is slower that PHP, RoR or Python.
The learning curve with Scala would properly be higher but I really, really like the Lift framework. And I think Twitter is using Scala.
However, when u write a non-trivial app (more than a web front-end or REST API), java starts to shine: there are soooooo many open source projects available with friendly commercial licensing, good tools for debugging, etc.etc., that you save a lot of time by just incorporating things rather than writing things.
This is not to say other languages don't provide these features - rails has some nice momentum (growing list of projects), python too, and say what u will about msft, c#/asp.net is a good combo (VS.NET is a great dev environment, and there is a relatively small but growing open-source movement - and Mono is fantastic for cross-platform work).
...but i'd say that the massive amount of effort and open source projects in java have been a godsend for my work - especially recently - and saved me enormous amounts of time.
...also, I've found that recent groovy and grails versions have made web dev super simple...and u can call all your java code ease. (And groovy++ (statically typed groovy extension) makes groovy performance for a lot of thing as fast as java.)
But the bottom line is that u should choose what u r most comfortable with.
Java would be a fine choice. Especially java / groovy / grails...and ignore the java projects u don't need (EJB, etc.).
On another note, I think the one language that startups should avoid (again for more than a simple web app talking directly to a DB) is PHP. Just try to extend it...or talk to an external service. yes, you can wrap your services with REST APIs...or use something like thrift...and i know there are several successful companies that use it (facebook, etc.etc.) - and i've been part of companies that use it too...but i think PHP puts yourself in handcuffs that a startup shouldn't really need. ...and it creates a "silo" around web development - not a good way to get going.
my $0.02. ;-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to think so as well but now there is a great framework called Play: http://www.playframework.org/
The problem with frameworks like Play, or Symfony in PHP world is that they only play catchup to frameworks like ROR and Django and since they started way later, they still lack the polish.