Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#1

Post by perezd » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 4:38 AM UTC

I get the feeling that most of the hackers here use something like Ruby on Rails or Django, but obviously I have no scientific evidence to prove this, so that is what brings this question to mind. What about Java? Are any of you using Java at your startup to develop your software infrastructure? If you are not, did you consider it in the beginning? what influenced your specific choice.

What about Dynamic languages written for Java such as Groovy or ColdFusion?

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#2

Post by danielha » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 5:37 AM UTC

http://www.mint.com

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#3

Post by jsjenkins168 » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 6:03 AM UTC

Google Web Toolkit, which is Java based. It is not popular among most other hackers though and I'm still not sure why. It is a powerful tool for building web applications if you can make it over the initial learning curve.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#4

Post by staunch » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 6:20 AM UTC

I sure hope so. I'm a huge fan of my competitors using Java. All these damn RoR and Django guys are too damn fast.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#5

Post by bosky101 » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 7:07 AM UTC

wer'nt the folks over at zenter using java?

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#6

Post by hacker64 » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 7:30 AM UTC

Using RoR is like taking a loan. You build it fast, but then spend a lot of time fixing it.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#7

Post by jamongkad » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 7:41 AM UTC

Just curious do people still hack in ColdFusion? I haven't heard from that language in a looong time.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#8

Post by fauigerzigerk » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 7:55 AM UTC

Java is definately a viable choice, no matter how unpopular it currently is. It has some real advantages over Ruby, the most important being speed, which translates into productivity if the alternative is mixing C and Ruby. Another advantage is proper unicode support.

I still decided against Java because I feel that meta programming could be that great enabler of the next productivity revolution. A revolution that smarter people than me have experienced ages ago. Having explored Java to some extremes, I know that many of the complexities of something like J2EE are down to the lack of powerful language internal meta programming facilities.

Why not JRuby? Because right now JRuby is even slower than C based Ruby and Ruby 2 will have a virtual machine too, which doesn't have to concern itself with anything other than serving Ruby.

Yes, Java has a lot of libraries. But how many of those am I really using in my startup? Quite a few, and it does take me some time to figure out good alternatives for Ruby. But at the end of the day the library issue doesn't make a big difference in my case.

The only thing that really concerns me about the popular dynamic languages is raw speed for algorithmic stuff. Yes I do need that for what I'm doing. If lisp had any momentum whatsoever I'd gladly jump onto something like sbcl because it has all the metaprogramming facilities and it's as fast as C.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#9

Post by elad » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 7:58 AM UTC

We're using both Java and Ruby. We started out with Ruby and Rails, which worked great for the prototype but we have some very processor-intensive operations and the Ruby code won't scale. Rewriting these in Java produced an instant 100-fold performance improvement, so going forward we're doing that stuff in Java. On the other hand, we have some text-processing stuff where Ruby really shines. Having used Ruby for that I'd never go back to Java for such tasks.

Re: Java-based Startups, do they exist?

#10

Post by Tichy » Tue, Sep 04, 2007, 8:18 AM UTC

elad wrote: post #9

We're using both Java and Ruby. We started out with Ruby and Rails, which worked great for the prototype but we have some very processor-intensive operations and the Ruby code won't scale. Rewriting these in Java produced an instant 100-fold performance improvement, so going forward we're doing that stuff in Java. On the other hand, we have some text-processing stuff where Ruby really shines. Having used Ruby for tha…

I actually like the regexp implementation of Java, and it is more complete than in most other languages. There are also many options for XML parsers. Where does the advantage for Ruby lie?