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Comment by lukefabish | Hacker News Reader

In corporate-land, enterprise web applications are generally .net or Java.

Enterprise Java is referred to as Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE). In this case, the web output a user sees in a browser is generated on an application server using a mix of Java code and templated HTML/CSS/Javascript/etc.

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Yes, but the interesting question is why? Many large corporations indeed use Java, and the often-touted reason is safety and/or speed. Is that still a valid answer in today's web dev world? What would you recommend that AT&T for example uses if they could start all over again today?

IMO, Java is appreciated for the following reasons:

  - there are plenty of reliable open source libraries (see Apache)
  - it is easy to learn and to maintain
  - the IDEs are good (IntelliJ IDEA !)

So, yes, this is still a valid answer, IMO.

also, the performances are quite good, and you are able to buy support from ibm/sun/oracle.

Neither it's true for python/ruby/perl etc.

there are more java and .net programmers out there than python/ruby programmers. hence a java programmer is easy to find, cheaper to hire and less disruptive to fire. This is probably one of the most important reasons why corporations prefer java/.net over ruby on rails/python. that said, when a programming language is around for more than a dozen years, it gains the tag of being reliable ( rightfully so).

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