Ask HN: Any web startups using Java?

IMO there is neither lack of hosting support (just use EC2 or a vserver) nor any serious performance issues.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.

I'm working for a startup that uses a mix of PHP for serving web requests, and Java for backend processing. Our use of Java has definitely been successful.<p>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."<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.

We are a London Startup, mainly building products off the back of web crawling &#38; 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 &#38; 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 application processes are all Java. We use hundreds of Java open source libraries, including HBase, Lucene &#38; OpenJPA. Addressing your issues 1) Lack of hosting support - we hire VPS, cloud or dedicated server infra on which we can deploy whatever we want - I don't see how this could be an issue. Even a cheap $10/month VPS gives you root these days 2) Performance issues? I won't get into a performance discussion but unless you've got google levels of traffic it's not worth worrying too much whatever platform/language you choose, a bigger challenge early on is attracting customers ;-) I used to work in banking &#38; Java was performant enough for our high frequency trading infrastructure, where performance really does matter. 3) We have been going 2.5 years now, a lot of what we do is server-side processing and data munching and the open source Java libraries we leveraged along the way really helped us get going, things like HBase, Lucence, Bdb, Natural Language Processing (OpenNLP), Neural Nets (Encog), Stats packages, HTML processing (Jericho, JTidy). I know there are API's and ports of these in other languages, but the Java open source community is enormous, just because it's been around for so long, so it's always easy to find someone who'se done it before.<p>EDIT (Summary): We knew Java well early on and so used it to prove a market, leveraging open source libraries along the way. Do I think Java the language was a particular competitive advantage to us? No. But do I think any of PHP, Ruby or Python would have been either? No. (Lisp - probably yes! but we don't know it well enough to use professionally). To be honest, our main concern early on is to release early and prove the market, with whatever tools we can use.

How times change - when we started in '95 the fact that we were doing a server side application in Java was seen as a <i>very</i> cool thing.<p>However, at some point about '99 or so Java seemed to endure a culture change where Java became popular as an "enterprise" platform and the values associated with that culture started to dominate a lot of discussions about how to do things. Suddenly everyone wanted to use <i>every</i> feature of J2EE in <i>every</i> project (largely for CV padding as far as I could see) - with predictably awful results.<p>However, Java has always been a pretty decent platform - we wrote search engines in it and things like Lucene continue to work pretty well. There are a lot of fascinating libraries for Java and performance <i>can</i> be excellent - it could be pretty fast in 2001/2002 and I assume it hasn't got slower....<p>If you can use Java and focus on "Keep Things Simple Stupid" then I can't think of many reasons not to use it - it might not be fashionable any more (those days are long gone) but it sure is capable.

We're using Java (and Google Web Toolkit) on thingloop.com, and it's working out great for us.<p>In answer to your questions:<p>1) Yeah, good cheap Java hosting doesn't seem to exist. That said, I think the Rackspace Cloud and Amazon EC2 are great solutions and great value for money.<p>2) Java is a high performance language, if you get performance issues it'll be your design/archiecture.<p>3) thingloop.com, successful from a technical standpoint, business-wise, the jury is still out!<p>On the whole question of which language, I'd say:<p>a) avoid religious arguments - my language is better than yours! They all have advantages and disadvantages.<p>b) a lot of it is down to what's cool. Ten years ago Java was the coolest kid on the block, now it's RoR. Thinking longer term, you might want to consider what the most available skillset is in your area for recruitment purposes.<p>c) if you've got a bunch of guys who already know a platform inside out, then stick with that. They'll almost certainly be way faster.

I used Java until 2002, then used Ruby until 2009, then switched to Javascript (server side). 3 months ago I decided to switch back to Java and I really feel I lost a decade with experiments.<p>It turns out, I am really a static-typing ...type after all.<p>With utilities like Spring Roo, frameworks like Jersey (JAX-RS), IDEs like Eclipse and platforms like GAE, Java can be really productive.

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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.

1) No, you can have a Java webapp up and running in &#60; 1 hour for &#60; $10/month on an EC2 micro instance. 2) Compared to the other popular languages right now, Java will solve far more performance problems than it adds. And yes, performance matters, and hardware doesn't solve everything. 3) We use Java at StyleFeeder, and reached profitability before being acquired. I credit our ability to pivot/refactor/scale quickly and cheaply enough to get to that point to many things, not the least of which is our decision to use Java.

I'm involved in multiple startups using Java - both the language and more broadly the JVM (Groovy, Scala).<p>Despite all the bad news you might hear, as long as you stay clear of the bloated enterprise stuff it's a great platform and environment for a startup.<p>Hosting used to be an impediment but these days VPS make it dead easy to run Java stuff.

Java will be definitely an option when we consider developing a web application. However at the moment we are not exactly web startup (developing android application).<p>Since we come from enterprise environment Java is the second mother tongue to us and I have got accustomed to mighty autocomplete and refactoring features of eclipse. The main reason for diverting from Java would be purely of taking intelectual pleasure in learning new things and checking if python/ruby frameworks live to the expectations.<p>We did some contract work on french social startup using a very lightweight web framework called Stripes (<a href="http://www.stripesframework.org" rel="nofollow">http://www.stripesframework.org</a>). It was much better experience that using component based UI frameworks like JSF.<p>Needless to say - for quick web hacking I still fall back to PHP.

A lot of Austin start-ups do: <a href="http://indeed.com" rel="nofollow">http://indeed.com</a>, <a href="http://homeaway.com" rel="nofollow">http://homeaway.com</a>, <a href="http://bazaarvoice.com" rel="nofollow">http://bazaarvoice.com</a>.

It is not performance or hosting concerns. Java performs good enough and you can host it on things like EC2.<p>The problem is that web startups tend to want to develop things quickly and be able to pivot quickly and easily. Java is not best at those things.<p>I know Java and worked with it for years. I do all of my startup coding in Lisp. Java forces you to do a lot of things that may make your code more reliable and easier for others to use, but it comes at the cost of being less productive, and in startups, being able to develop quickly is extremely important. That is why languages like Lisp or Ruby or Python are much more popular in the startup world.

I sold a Java-based program for about four years and have a previous background in Big Freaking Enterprise Java Web Development.<p>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 <i>heavily</i> on how experienced you are at administering systems and how much Java enterprise coffee you want to drink.<p>Java is a mature language. Libraries exist for almost any task you reasonably want to accomplish. There are skilled Java-speaking programmers in your area. Whatever you doing has almost certainly been done in Java already, and it has probably already been documented extensively. Java is an opinionated language: it is of the opinion that your workflow should resemble IBM's more than it does 37Signals', and if that is true, you and Java will get along nicely together.<p>There, mandatory praise out of the way. Java is <i>horrifically maladapted</i> to certain classes of problems and certain classes of users. One class of problem is expressively operating on strings to produce other strings. One class of users is anybody with a team size less than ten. Many web startups have a small team which is primarily interested in turning strings into other strings: if this is you, Java is going to fight you <i>every step of the way</i>.<p>99% of web application development for a certain type of business is turning strings into other strings. Many web development languages/frameworks popular with startups give you very expressive options for churning out certain types of strings quickly and with little cognitive load. For example, in Rails, there is very vanishingly little work in taking a bunch of strings from the blog_posts table and turning them into strings which encode a blog post into HTML. And if you want to add special strings that cause comments to be loaded in an AJAXy fashion, that is quick, too. Want to make sure that the strings the user is commenting with include certain strings which look like email addresses? Add one line to your program, and bam, if someone puts in a bad string they get a red string telling them how to make it a good string. It is all string rainbows and string unicorns. If you fat-finger your one line, it is very possible that large portions of your site will instantly break, but that is OK because if you program like everyone else using Rails programs, your magic guardian angel strings will get your attention before you deploy, and after you fix your typo everything is rainbows and unicorns again.<p>There are many Java frameworks. They can all operate on strings and produce other strings. However, the experience of actually doing this is maddening: pulling off the above you-give-me-bad-strings-I-give-you-red-strings can be a matter of touching six files or more, often written in painstaking configuration formats. The frameworks assume you are guilty of incompetence and force you to repeatedly prove you are otherwise, the better to prevent idiots like you from taking the site down.<p>This is a problem for startups because <i>web startups are not about turning strings into other strings</i>: that is just what they <i>do</i>. Web startups are about finding a problem people will pay money to solve. That is where they ideally spend most of their efforts. Sometimes, those explorations require code to be written, and when code gets written it should be quick to write, quick to test, quick to deploy, and quick to rip out when you discover your users don't respond the way you thought they would.<p>Java as it is practiced in the real world looks at that list of requirements and sees Very Scary Things.

I have been part of building a web startup using Java technologies. Our stack was - 1. Apache + Jetty 2. Java 3. GWT 4. Rules engine (drools) 5. Solr/Lucene for searching 6. Mysql (InnoDB) 7. Amazon web services (EC2, S3)<p>Experience was good. I generally try staying away from frameworks like Struts, JSF for a consumer facing web app. They make sense in enterprise domain, but not so much in web.<p>I am right now building a product on my own using GWT (Java to JS cross compiler), Scala and Mongodb as my stack. Experience is again pretty good.<p>On the backend I chose Scala over Java mainly because I require lot of parallel processing to crunch data.

The Mibbit backend is Java. It gives us massive advantages over any competition.<p>The JVM is extremely fast and optimized. We handle many thousands of requests a second on a few VPSes.

I've used java since 1995. I agree that some EE projects are overly-complicated (EJB, etc.) and make simple tasks seem difficult. ...However, there's usually a reason - and, the bottom line is that you probably don't need to use those projects anyway.<p>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 <i>save</i> a lot of time by just incorporating things rather than writing things.<p>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).<p>...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.<p>...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.)<p>But the bottom line is that u should choose what u r most comfortable with.<p>Java would be a fine choice. Especially java / groovy / grails...and ignore the java projects u don't need (EJB, etc.).<p>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.<p>my $0.02. ;-)

I work at a startup that uses Java. When it started, the CTO knew java so thats what they picked. Now, the company has grown to around 10 people with over a million users. They're monetizing pretty well and are well on their way to being very successful.<p>As (almost) always, performance issues are with the db. And, as always, you should think about the data structure that you're using.

We decided to use Java and especially Wicket for our startup tasqade.com last year. I must say, I am still more than happy with this decision. Wicket is an awesome, growing framework, which made our lives so much easier. The clear seperation of code and html is just wonderful.<p>Secondly, we are Berlin based. Security and stability is such a big issue in German companies. You might agree or disagree if it is really true for Java software to be safer or more reliable, but just mentioning "Java" helps to sell to those companies.

Follow up question: Any startups using Scala?<p>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.

Java has a strong background in enterprise solutions. So, e.g., if you need to build some sort of high performance distributed system then it's not an entirely wrong choice to go with Java. Java is good at that stuff.<p>A web application is often more than the choice web framework. When you choose Java as your fundamental technology you could build your business logic e.g. in Java/Scala and your web tier in Ruby on Rails which you can run on JRuby.<p>At least, that's probably the choice I'd make... :)

Yes, web startups are using Java, like mine. What I can't figure out is why the other startups need so many developers. :)

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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.

Check out www.playframework.org they have a successstories site that shows successful startups for their bundle. I'm working on a site right now using it, it's really neat. Scales really good, and is totally lightweight.

You can do some really awesome stuff with GWT+Java, although GWT is like that girlfriend that always wants to be exclusive.

I was in a startup that built a MySQL/Spring/Wicket app, and I'm building a Mongo/Play one right now. So, point by point:<p>1) Java isn't amenable to pre-installed hosting like PHP is. You usually deal with machine images that you have to prepare yourself. Jetty 7 + Nginx is the going coin, it's quick and easy<p>2) Java is outright the best performing language of the ones currently used for web development with any degree of frequency (PHP, Python and Ruby being the other ones I'd mention). There's 10+ years of optimization and garbage collection research in those VM's, and language is statically typed, which increases verbosity yes, but also performance<p>3) If you extend the view beyond start-ups, Java isn't just getting used - the world runs on it. If it's a web app of any meaningful size, there's a 90%+ it's written or getting written in Java. The only other language that has this wide an acceptance level is PHP, which is a different animal entirely. Not to disrespect RoR or Django, but their overall share of the web development market is negligible<p>Keeping in mind the bias that comes from 12+ years of dealing in Java, here's a quick pro-con for what it's worth:<p>pro =&#62; - Java is fast. Very fast - Tool support is unrivaled. It's hard to appreciate what an IDE can do to speed up your work until you've gotten your first couple dozen IntelliJ keystrokes in the muscle memory. RoR is not faster to write than Java (a frequent claim) - Library support is unrivaled as well. Whatever it is, there's already a library for it, usually quite well-documented, and most questions that come up are googlable on the spot (something I sorely miss when I have to work Rails on occasion) - with the entry of Play, speed and ease of web development is approaching dynamic languages: write, hit reload, be done - knowledge and people to hire are available widely - the JVM is also home to Scala and Clojure. Starting in Java and moving to Scala is a pattern these days<p>con =&#62; - it's wordy and, compared to, say, Ruby or Scala, downright ugly. Not a big deal as far as start-up success is concerned, mostly a hacker bragging right. Nothing wrong with bragging as long as it doesn't get in the way of getting stuff done - generics and collection syntax is unwieldy. IDE support takes care of some of that, but not all - there's arcane stuff one needs to get used to - a learning curve of sorts. Again, mitigated by the widely available documentation and Google support<p>hope this helps.<p>- z

I'll give you my take on this as a Java programmer of 10+ years experience.<p>The problem you will have with Java in a startup is that Java's frameworks are by and large built for "enterprises". I put that in quotes because in one sense it doesn't really mean anything. In another, it's more of an idea of what governments and large companies want.<p>Even when using Spring (which, in my opinion, is a "must have" for pretty much any Java Web project), the amount of boilerplate required to set up an endpoint, map form data to objects, map those "presentation objects" into "business objects", map those "business objects" into a DAO (data access object), etc is pure torture.<p>Now this isn't completely the fault of the language. The language certainly doesn't help matters by being statically typed. This just doesn't gel well with how "fast" Web development works. Compare that to PHP (as just one example), where form data is just a map (hash or simply "array" in PHP parlance). Add a new field? Not a problem.<p>Add a new field in Java and you'll be making class modifications in about eight different places.<p>The bigger part of the problem is not the static typing though, it's the philosophies that dominate the Java landscape. There is a joke about the Java programmer's response to any problem is "just add one more layer and it'll be OK". It's funny because it's true.<p>It's fair to say that Fowleresque division of responsibility based layering is pervasive.<p>Of course the dynamic languages can have other problems (eg no error when misspelling a form field) and Java's static typing has, in my opinion, made Java's IDEs the best of any language or platform bar none (IntelliJ in particular). IDEs seem less able with dynamic languages because it's much harder (if not downright impossible) for an IDE to, for example, derive the members (let alone the types of those members, if that concept has meaning) on the fly.<p>Weirdly some in the PHP world have tried to mimic Java's deep layering with these horrific (imho) MVC frameworks that (again imho) simply combine the worst of both worlds. Dynamic class loading, bootstrappers, magic (and sometimes unpredictable) file loading, enforced directory structures and so on are just the wrong approach most of the time.<p>Java does have some benefits though. There are basically three tiers of languages in terms of performance (from best to worst):<p>1. C/C++/Assembler: the true compiled languages;<p>2. Java, C# (and the other .Net languages): the bytecode or virtual machine "semi-compiled" languages; and<p>3. Python, Perl, Ruby, PHP, etc: the scripted languages.<p>I qualify this by saying: most of the time (particularly for Web apps and especially if you don't have Google-level scale problems) <i>performance doesn't matter</i>. What matters is productivity and productivity is similarly tiered from worst to best in that above list. Hardware is now so cheap that it's far more effective to throw hardware at <i>most</i> problems than it is to write things in C. This is <i>almost</i> universally true when it comes to the Web where network latency and the speed at which the browser can process your page (and Javascript) will dwarf serverside performance <i>most of the time</i>.<p>I did a bunch of the Facebook puzzles awhile ago. The breathazlyer one was quite interesting. I started doing that in Python but it is somewhat difficult to get a solution to pass in that. Java is an order of magnitude faster. C is one <i>or more</i> orders of magnitude faster yet again.<p>So back to your original question (now that my answer has some context): I would say that using Java may make sense if everyone knows it and is comfortable with it. If not you will find many speed barriers along the way of learning a new language that may just slow you down or (worse) may create huge problems (eg security issues you weren't aware of because something didn't work the way you simply assumed that it did).<p>None of these problems are insurmountable but the way I figure it is this: when writing something new, chances are that within a year you'll be best off throwing it out and starting again anyway as the problem changes, you identify your bottlenecks (often not what you thought they'd be to begin with) and your scale changes.<p>So don't try and find the perfect language or platform or framework. Write something now and don't try and solve every problem you may ever have today.

It's not a strict either/or. Even those who are using more dynamic languages/frameworks for their web-facing services may use Java for deeper infrastructure: Lucene/SOLR for search, Hadoop/HDFS for large data-mining, HBase/Cassandra for big-NoSQL tables.

I've just developed a website using Java, for the HN November "Launch an App Month." It's a Javascript-heavy frontend plus Java backend app, with a whole separate background processing pipeline done in Java. I'll do a show and tell in couple days once it's ready.<p>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'm not on the development team, so don't know the rational behind it, but I know we're using GWT and Java at Rypple. I can connect you with one of our developers if you're interested. My email is in my profile.

Our main product isn't a web application, but we're the oddball startup that's using Java/Swing to build a desktop application which is a visual designer for creating both Flash and most recently, iOS games.<p>Our ability to deploy to Windows and Mac is giving us a leg over some competition that's unable to serve the larger Windows market. Being able to knock out new features very rapidly (within minutes/hours) is another advantage.<p>Reminds me of PG's essay about how Viaweb was able to implement a competitor's feature the same day it came out...

Sure they are using Java, through languages like Scala and Clojure both of which runs on the JVM, neither of which forces you to actually write in Java.<p>These days there is basically no reason to do webdevelopment in Java - even if you have legacy stuff lying around, JRuby or Scala will serve you much better and neither is that hard to learn and both will get you over Javas sever limitations (really, no anonymous functions? No Closures?)

linkedin, hulu, rapleaf, flixster, zillow

My startup <a href="http://www.onmydoorstep.com.au/" rel="nofollow">http://www.onmydoorstep.com.au/</a> is Java/Wicket/Guice/Lucene based.<p>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.

4) Hiring is a slog as most Java people you come across will only know the "Enterprise" way of doing something and seem oblivious to any of the web frameworks out there or any pragmatic and quick solution to something that they already know an "Enterprise" solution for.

IMO, web startups choose Java when:<p>1) founders are most familiar with Java<p>2) founders are more comfortable with top-down engineering practices and not with bottom-up, release-early release-often approach.<p>3) core technology depends heavily on non-trivial open source Java libraries.

We use a lot of Java at media6degrees, entirely for performance/integration reasons. There's a reason Cassandra, Hadoop, HBase, etc are all written in Java. I'm still trying to figure out what that reason is but my guess is that Java's the least bad language for what they're accomplishing, maybe that'll be Go in the future.<p>Of course, we aren't doing content management or anything, the front-facing stuff is a tiny minority of what we do, so that makes Java an even better choice. If I was writing a CMS or an app that was primarily webby in nature, I'd take a look at a more dynamic language (possibly still on the JVM).

At Viddler (<a href="http://www.viddler.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.viddler.com</a>), we're using Java for the core parts of the site, including an API, which we build on top of using a combination of Ruby and PHP.

<i>Generalization ahead</i><p>Java is mostly snubbed in web startup land and associated with boring corporate work.<p>More discussion here: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1378815" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1378815</a>

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 application usually is much easier than everything else and performance of jvm very good comparing to other platforms.

Another perspective is that Salary and competition for Java programmers are way beyond affordable for most start ups who have not made it big.<p>Java is widely used in Financial, Insurance sectors. (There are several others as well but I speak of these from personal experience) I can offer up to $95k for a top level Java programmer. I do not think start up salaries can go that high. Of course there are no big stock options pay day like in a start-up but it is easy to see why some programmers would rather work in a bank than at your start up.

The startup that I used to work for was recently sold to a popular silicon valley based company for 30 million usd. Full Java. Running on own servers and EC2. Highly scaleable service based architecture.<p>It happens.

We use Java, MongoDB, Hadoop and embedded Jetty at MetaBroadcast, we try to keep it simple: no enterprise bloat etc. We've not had any performance issues.

2 main reasons i can say about this are:<p>1. creating application in PHP is quite easy. no servlet , no configuration and just start writing the application. 2. PHP hosting are cheaper. But now a days Google apps are providing free hosting for Java apps.<p>BTW I am quite in favor of Java web apps. Java web apps are more stable and maintainable.

DOmedia (<a href="http://domedia.com" rel="nofollow">http://domedia.com</a>) in Columbus, Ohio uses Java/JSP.

There are many big web companies that use Hadoop, which is a Java based distributed computing platform (based on Map Reduce). These include Facebook, Yahoo and Last.fm.<p>Theres an ever growing list at <a href="http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy" rel="nofollow">http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/PoweredBy</a>

I've seen a lot of startups using Java for web application development. Its not not that they are unaware of the other dynamic languages or the new rapid prototyping web app framework. But I guess its due to their reluctance to move to the new setup.

I built Klicktrack based on Java and it's a great platform for a startup especially for larger teams. The only drawback I can think of is the compile deploy cycle which can be a bit annoying compared to scripting languages but it can be mitigated.

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...

We're a startup here in Australia and we use Java extensively. It has been trickier to use than PHP but the extra effort has allowed us to produce a very sophisticated system.

I'm building an app in OfBiz, but its a little bit overkill for what I need. My partner is also really enthusiastic about Tapestry but I haven't really looked into it.

1) We use dedicated hosting, it is still best on terms of reliability and security.<p>2) Not at all. But you need seasoned developers.<p>3) Our platform runs mostly in Java. So far good performance.

Java's the primary language here at Meetup, as well as at the previous company I worked at (Webs.com). To be honest it hasn't been that bad.

At Demdex, we use Java very heavily on both the back-end (e.g., Hadoop) and the front-end (e.g., Struts, etc.)

I met someone from Lockerz who said they have a PHP fron end and a Java service layer.

We are just using Java for teaching porpuses.

Squarespace is a lot of Java.

Quantcast is -- a huge amount of hadoop and performance sensitive code, and the majority of our external website.<p>1 - we self host<p>2 - the relevant performance issue when using java to develop web apps is it's slower to build. I'd be pretty surprised if there were many cases where java / tomcat is slower to execute than rails or django. Now obviously all three are smoked by cached pages, but since a lot of our data needs to be updated daily, that isn't the easiest design for us.

#1 reason: Java is a verbose language with a rather verbose design philosophy/ecosystem<p>which is not to say it's bad. it's actually really good, with lots of great qualities.<p>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.<p>there are other factors, sure, but I think this is the biggest one.

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).