Java-based Startups, do they exist?

It's true for every language you don't know well. No one writes bug free Java code from scratch after few months of experience.

Also, even if you're right, it's not that bad, as it sounds. It's not possible to write something good at a first try. Code, like wine, takes time. A language that fools you to think otherwise makes your work harder.

I think the whole problem with Rails is the premise that you can create whole sites in a minute or two, literally without any significant experience.

www.dimdim.com I think these guyz use Java.

We use Java - although, to be quite honest we were a PHP shop starting out, but then we got a big-league client who said they wanted a system built from scratch and, oh by the way, "it has to be in Java". Four years later, we have a mid-size application (80K lines) that operates well and is attracting more clients, though I often feel we have stepped into a few 'pits of despair' while building it. There are several 1500-line servlets which grind away on certain tasks, for example.

The upside is, we are now putting out our I18N'ed version of the product and it was very easy to produce a version of the app in a Unicode-based language, which will probably land us several more clients this year.

In short, Java can be great and there are a lot of things out there to help you build an app, but it only works as long as you keep the code clean and exercise your own discipline to keep from getting too sloppy. Otherwise, you can wind up with code that needs a rewrite from day one.

It's important to differentiate "Java" from the "JVM". Java is a programming language that gets compiled to bytecodes, and the JVM is an execution environment that runs bytecodes. (There is some java-language-ish stuff in the bytecode spec, but for the most part you can treat them separately).

In my opinion, Java is a clumsy language but the JVM is awesome. Static typing and lack of first-class functions or easy data types make Java programs verbose and annoying to change. The JVM, on the other hand, is fast, portable, well-specified, and there are a ton of libraries that run on it.

To have the best of both worlds, you can use the JVM to run a more dynamic language (not Java)! There are many projects to bring different languages to the JVM, but my favorite is Rhino, which compiles JavaScript to bytecodes. Rhino is also what powers my favorite web framework, Helma.

i use java