> Java, with its faults, has completely conquered web application programming. On the sidelines, charging hard, new languages are being invented at a rate that is mind-blowing, to also conquer web application programming. The two are pitted together, and we’re left with what looks a bunch of preppy mall-kids battling for street territory by break dancing. And while everyone is bickering around whether PHP or Rails 3.1 runs faster and can serve more simultaneous requests, there lurks a silent elephant in the room, which is laughing quietly as we duke it out in childish arguments over syntax and runtimes.

Nice job writing a 1000 word article about Java and web application programming without mentioning the elephant in the room C# with ASP.NET

I've seen small and medium shops move over to or adopt C# at a very high rate(for internal web apps) in the past 5 years. .NET is big in the government too and C# is adding nice feaures that Java has either no equivalent or a poor implementation not to mentions technologies like ASP.NET MVC.

THAT is what is eating Java's lunch more than anything else. It boggles the mind how someone could write a whole essay on this topic without mentioning C#/ASP.NET. I think that's a symptom of reading popular blogs around the internet which talk only about things like PHP/Ruby/Python etc. but comes across as incredibly shortsighted.