A couple of weeks ago BusinessWeek published an article titled: Java? It's So Nineties. The main points of the article are some somewhat questionable stats and comments about companies moving away from Java to .NET, PHP, LAMP, etc. At one point the article mentions that large web companies like Google do not rely on Java. Hmmm...I recall an interview last fall with a Google software engineer who stated "Google makes extensive use of the Java platform. Large parts of popular Google products are written in Java. We also use Java in many internal systems and products under development. " For the rest of the interview, click here. Before taking this article too seriously, I suggest you read the on-line responses to it as well as other responses around the web such as those found at Slashdot and TheServerSide.com.
Personally, I think scripting languages like PHP are fine for lightweight web applications. For those needing more computing power, Java is a great choice. What scares most neophyte developers is the sheer volume of libraries, apis, etc. that make up Java. It's hard to know where to start and what to adopt. For a language/platform (because let's face it, Java is more than a language) that is "so Nineties" there's a lot of work being done in the open source community that extends Java. Is the same thing happening for platforms such as .NET? Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking .NET. I'm just not seeing the same buzz of activity around it that I do Java.
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