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. <p>What about Dynamic languages written for Java such as Groovy or ColdFusion?
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).<p>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.<p>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.
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. <p>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.<p>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. <p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
I use the JVM, but not the Java language.<p>I extended Scheme to make BRL, <a href="http://brl.codesimply.net/" rel="nofollow">http://brl.codesimply.net/</a><p>I use it in <a href="http://ourdoings.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ourdoings.com/</a>
<a href="http://www.fleaflicker.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.fleaflicker.com/</a> is 100% java.<p>I started developing it in '05 before Rails was huge. Using Java has actually been a huge advantage:<p><i> There are hundreds of high quality open source libraries.
</i> GWT allows me to leverage existing data structures and algorithms on the client-side.
<a href="http://tipit.to/" rel="nofollow">http://tipit.to/</a> is mostly GWT on the front and all java on the server.<p>CF is crap. Groovy is okay, but not -that- great. I'd go with jython or jruby instead if you're thinking of using Groovy.<p>Scala is absolutely great. It's my favourite language. tipit's server side isn't Scala based only because I wasn't fully aware of Scala when we started out. Scala is functional in theory but even with a very imperative background you can write your code and slowly get used to solving problems 'the functional way', which does come off a bit cleaner (e.g. using case classes).
We use Java. It seems a great alternative for us but you do need to know how to work with it and how to integrate it.<p>We didn't use ruby because it would take us some time to learn it, and I wasn't sure on the maturity. I also prefer strong typing. I have experience with C, Smalltalk, C++, Perl and Java.
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.
I know java since ever and when I think code, I think java.
Thats why I use it. For me it is the most productive environment.<p>Why do you ask at all? If you know java, use it. If you know c (well, not c) - if you know python, use it. If you have to learn something, because you don't know any language, get a job first and think about a startup after you dream in (put here any language).<p>Any scripting language basing on java will be slower than java. My opinion is: if you can avoid another software layer, avoid it. It makes you depend on more code that you don't control, slows down your apps. <p>
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.
Java often feels like "playing fetch" to me:<p><a href="http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/11/23/playing-fetch" rel="nofollow">http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2006/11/23/playing-fetch</a><p>In other words, there's so much makework that a small team is at a disadvantage compared to a bigger team, which is not the kind of playing field a startup wants to be on.
I am using java for juwo. Swing looks kludgy compared with flash, but Apollo Flash that lets it run offline is in beta - and Java Web Start has been running for 4-6 years.