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Comment by cgh | Hacker News Reader

With all the nice alternative frameworks available for the JVM these days, including some pretty micro/bare-bones alternatives, I wonder if Java will find new favour with startups or if they'll stick with Rails. The old "the Java ecosystem is too complex/over-engineered" excuse falls down with stuff like Play or Grizzly.

I fully realise the language itself is annoying and clunky and that Scala is not necessarily the answer. I'm just saying that there are some serious upsides to consider beyond language aesthetics.

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Which is more expensive, servers or developers? Which is more expensive, server or opportunity cost?

In a lot of cases, performance of the server isn't the determining variable in the overall cost calculation.

In addition, the relationships between those variables likely changes over time.

I'm guessing that for most startups, HR expenses and opportunity costs are pretty important relative to actual server performance.

Obviously, if the point of your startup is some kind of high-performance computing thing, the equation is tipped more towards server performance. But, you probably aren't using off-the-shelf frameworks in that case, either.

Not to beat a dead horse, but ask Twitter. I expect their answer would be something like "Migrating off a non-performant solution to Java was more expensive than just doing it right in the first place."

Also, my point was that the newer jvm frameworks aren't much more complex or time-consuming than Rails so developer cost isn't such an issue. That said, not much compares to Rails for getting stuff up and running quickly.

Cost is relative to the maturity of the business. They may not have had the funds or time to do things the right way the first time, and if they had tried, they might not have ever made it into near-unlimited-budget-land.

Fair enough, back then the newer, sleeker jvm frameworks may not have existed. But now, perhaps there's no such excuse.

Maybe these options will become really compelling once Kotlin is released. It compiles to both the jvm and JS so it will hit the performance, convenience and "fun to write" sweet spots all at once...or so I hope.

The quickstart for grizzly[0] contains a staggering amount of boilerplate code. I don't think anyone's going to be running back to the JVM for that.

https://grizzly.java.net/quickstart.html

Ok, but that's not code for an HTTP app, it's a raw socket echo client and server.

Yes, and a lot of it is comments.

Rails is so 2008... node.js is the new hotness.

I don't like Rails, however....Bitch please -_-.

That's okay, what's old is new again. Haven't you heard that Perl is hip again?

You got to be kidding me -_-.

Of course it is =)

  # WebSocket echo service
  websocket '/echo' => sub {
    my $self = shift;
    $self->on(message => sub {
      my ($self, $msg) = @_;
      $self->send("echo: $msg");
    });
  };

I said that in jest not because it's ridiculous, but because I wish it were true. I use Mojolicious and love it.

My only complaint is that I started with Mojolicious::Lite way back in the beginning of the project, and I really needed to port to Mojolicious proper with a better source file layout quite a while back, but Mojolicious makes it too easy to throw in another lite-style route. At least the templates were easy enough to separate that I did it long ago.

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