Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

1. The LAMP stack is open source and cost effective;
2. J2EE is used, but only as part of the application stack, not as the entire stack itself.

The application stack of these Web applications [Ed. Note: Google, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, TypePad, WikiPedia, flickr] is very different from the stack that mission-critical applications in the financial world are built with. In the financial world, Java -- and to a lesser degree J2EE -- is used extensively. In recent years scalability requirements in capital markets led to a rapid shift in the middleware stack, introducing Compute Grid solutions for virtualization of CPU resources, enabling parallelization of batch applications. Data Grids were also introduced, enabling the virtualization of memory resources. Spring is becoming the common development framework in this world. At GigaSpaces, we're seeing more and more cases where Spring acts as a complete alternative to J2EE.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

The application stack of these Web applications [Ed. Note: Google, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, TypePad, WikiPedia, flickr] is very different from the stack that mission-critical applications in the financial world are built with.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts...

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts. I think the Java community just needs to admit that these are complete disasters and focus on what Java is good at. The good news is that this is already happening as Java is accepting other tools into it's fold instead of trying to replace them.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts...

Well, I just dived into Ruby on Rails and guess what - it is exactly mirrors Struts MVC architecture and rhtml files are exactly like JSPs :)

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I am not saying that there are no disasters, but other platforms are not actually except from the same problem of trying to do it all.

And I would not go as far as to say that JSP or Struts are disasters. I think there are worse things in the Java land, at least there were.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

But I also think the age of "Java everywhere for everything" is over and that's a good thing.

We have start ASK questions why most people are STUPIDS?

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

But I also think the age of "Java everywhere for everything" is over and that's a good thing.

Unfortunately didn't Jonathan Schwarz claim the exact opposite when rechristening Sun's stock ticker from SUNW to JAVA?

Title is rather misleading

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I think from a long term maintenance perspective, they are really big problems. And lets be honest, JSP was Suns "me too" answer to ASP. I don't think it was the brainchild of some high-minded philosopher.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

The application stack of these Web applications [Ed. Note: Google, Amazon, eBay, LinkedIn, TypePad, WikiPedia, flickr] is very different from the stack that mission-critical applications in the financial world are built with.

I've personally visited with engineering teams at Google, Amazon, eBay and LinkedIn all this year. They all use Java extensively for their web sites.

Peace,

Cameron Purdy
Oracle Coherence: Data Grid for Java and .NET

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I think from a long term maintenance perspective, they are really big problems. And lets be honest, JSP was Suns "me too" answer to ASP. I don't think it was the brainchild of some high-minded philosopher.

It's interesting to see someone condemn the JSP paradigm while acknowledging the success of something like PHP when they're essentially identical.

JSP has all of the problems and features of PHP.

There are obviously some differences, of course, but they both live in the realm of "code + content", with simply developer discipline the only factor involved in keeping code out of content.

JSP technology is fine. It works, it's powerful, has a low barrier to entry, and will scale with the best of them because of its Java foundations.

Modern JSP is eminently refactorable. It's easy to start with a pure JSP application, migrate to JSP + Beans, from there to a Model 2 application, and from there to an N tier whatever, incrementally upgrading and transforming the application as you go.

Java hosting is what holds JSP back. PHP is dirt cheap to host, from a system resources and support perspective for hosting companies. Java is much more difficult compared to JSP, so PHP is ubiquitous (and thus expertise and demand are also more widespread in this domain).

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts...

Well, I just dived into Ruby on Rails and guess what - it is exactly mirrors Struts MVC architecture and rhtml files are exactly like JSPs :)

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I think from a long term maintenance perspective, they are really big problems. And lets be honest, JSP was Suns "me too" answer to ASP. I don't think it was the brainchild of some high-minded philosopher.

It's interesting to see someone condemn the JSP paradigm while acknowledging the success of something like PHP when they're essentially identical.

JSP has all of the problems and features of PHP.

JSP technology is fine. It works

, it's powerful,

has a low barrier to entry,

and will scale with the best of them because of its Java foundations.

Modern JSP is eminently refactorable. It's easy to start with a pure JSP application, migrate to JSP + Beans, from there to a Model 2 application, and from there to an N tier whatever, incrementally upgrading and transforming the application as you go.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...rails mirrors struts MVC - you must be nuts.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

PHP is for code junkies who say the word " cool "every 15 minutes. :-) It cannot scale and its very page centric. PHP guys just accept it, you have not done any serious enterprise development with PHP. A few registration forms, a few graphs and forgot password pages is all what you can do with PHP.
Ofcourse I will get a lot of bashing to say this but its true. We tried it for a internal CSR facing application in a big insurance company and it failed miserably. Just didnt work. we moved to java. I agree though with some overhead cost of java,jsp.

Peace please !

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts...

Well, I just dived into Ruby on Rails and guess what - it is exactly mirrors Struts MVC architecture and rhtml files are exactly like JSPs :)

rails mirrors struts MVC - you must be nuts.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

rails mirrors struts MVC - you must be nuts.

Not at all crazy. The design of Rails is *extremely* close to Struts.

Very different to modern Java web frameworks.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I never mentioned PHP.

Powerful in what sense?

That must be why I am always helping people with it.

Yes, JSP is great for moving away from JSP.

language is incidental

Most large-scale websites are not written in ...

total flame bait

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I never mentioned PHP.

No, but this thread is, essentially, about PHP (many of the referenced web sites are "PHP" sites).

Powerful in what sense?

That must be why I am always helping people with it.

That's right. That's why you're not helping them with Tapestry or JSF pages, where they'd be dead in the water and not make any progress at all and have no reason to even talk to you. At least now they're trying and learning something because it's easy to get started.

That means there is very little lock in, and makes it a safe medium for experimentation.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

We are feeling pretty locked it. Struts compounds the pain. We've got a lot of code embedded in these JSP pages where I can't really see how we will extract it without basically rewriting it. If you have some suggestions for removing Struts and JSPs from an application I'm listening (figuratively, of course.)

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I'm just don't think that Java is a good language for presentation.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Java isn't really a good language for writing web pages. Actually, it's never been very good for any kind of presentation layer. It's niche is in the stodgy back-end
parts of a system.

Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts. I think the Java community just needs to admit that these are complete disasters and focus on what Java is good at. The good news is that this is already happening as Java is accepting other tools into it's fold instead of trying to replace them.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

...Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts...

Well, I just dived into Ruby on Rails and guess what - it is exactly mirrors Struts MVC architecture and rhtml files are exactly like JSPs :)

rails mirrors struts MVC - you must be nuts.

Not at all crazy. The design of Rails is *extremely* close to Struts. Very different to modern Java web frameworks.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

PHP - Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

OOP was "invented" in 80s

Re: PHP - Java

More specialists use PHP and there is more scripts and CMS ready rwiten in PHP.

Now the framework Java that facilite web developement are growing. There is more and more web application writen in Java.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

OOP was "invented" in 80s

Off by over twenty years, kid unless you were attempting to be ironic. Pick up a book or at least wikipedea to get some knowledge on a subject if you are going to use it in an argument.

Object-oriented programming roots reach all the way back to the 1960s... It was not commonly used in mainstream software application development until the early 1990s...Smalltalk was the first programming language to be called "object-oriented".

The language was first generally released as Smalltalk-80 and has been widely used since.

Dr. Bjarne Stroustrup developed C++ in 1979 at Bell Labs as an enhancement to the C programming language and named it "C with Classes". In 1983 it was renamed to C++.

This is Complete Bullshit

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

If you would have read the comments before you, then you would know that the article is wrong, most of the mentioned sites use java extensively.

RoR / Mongrel

1) PHP hosting is absolutely widespread and very very cheap. Every big telco offers some kind of free PHP hosting with the Internet connection but almost no one Java. RoR as a simple Apache plug-in is entering fast in this category.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

You have mixed code and content in your JSP pages. Obviously not a good thing to do. So far we are in total agreement.

<%@ include file="/kana/listpageheader.jsp"%>

<t:listpage beanclass="action.ProviderActionBean" 
            itemName="Provider"
            keyName="provider.providerKey" 
            menuId="PopupItemProviderList">
			
  <jsp:attribute name="actions">
    <t:taskgroup section="listRowSelected" 
                 style="display:none;">        
      <t:taskaction icon="/kana/img/toolbar_icon_print.gif" 
                    href="javascript:doPrintPDF()"
                    label="Print Report PDF"
                    selected="true"/>
    </t:taskgroup>
  </jsp:attribute>

  <jsp:body>     
    <t:table>
      <t:column property="fullName" 
                title="Name" sortable="true" 
                maxLength="60" width="50%"/>
      <t:column property="labProviderId" 
                title="Provider ID" sortable="true"
                maxLength="60" width="25%"/>
      <t:column property="medicareId" 
                title="Medicare ID" sortable="true"
                maxLength="60" width="25%"/>
    </t:table>
  </jsp:body>
</t:listpage>

Re: RoR / Mongrel

1) PHP hosting is absolutely widespread and very very cheap. Every big telco offers some kind of free PHP hosting with the Internet connection but almost no one Java. RoR as a simple Apache plug-in is entering fast in this category.

Referring to the RoR part:
Not true. Typically you have a Mongrel cluster sitting behind Apache. Mongrel acts as application server for the Rails app.

Same setup as with Java/JEE.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

Java isn't really a good language for writing web pages. Actually, it's never been very good for any kind of presentation layer. It's niche is in the stodgy back-end parts of a system.

Java has discredited itself with misguided attempts to Java-ize all parts of a system e.g. JSP and Struts. I think the Java community just needs to admit that these are complete disasters and focus on what Java is good at. The good news is that this is already happening as Java is accepting other tools into it's fold instead of trying to replace them.

Switch to PHP now for this reason

PHP is for code junkies who say the word " cool "every 15 minutes. :-)

Re: Switch to PHP now for this reason

So isn't this better than saying the word "boring" every 15 minutes as seen in enterprise developers (who can only "cool" when their eyes land on a Dilbert strip)?

Isn't enjoying your work every 15 minutes the best thing we can hope for?

Maybe we should start learning PHP.

Re: Switch to PHP now for this reason

"So, I reworked the posting program so that the new invoices are processed faster. Also the process is restartable in case of a system failure so we don't have to rerun the entire batch. And all of the unit tests are in. It even all balances!"

"Cool!"

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

We are feeling pretty locked it. Struts compounds the pain. We've got a lot of code embedded in these JSP pages where I can't really see how we will extract it without basically rewriting it. If you have some suggestions for removing Struts and JSPs from an application I'm listening (figuratively, of course.)

I agree with you that you seem to be in an awkward position. I don't really see how it is technology-related, though.

You have mixed code and content in your JSP pages. Obviously not a good thing to do. So far we are in total agreement.

You also seem to be saying that there is some technology out there that will replace competence with technology, so that mistakes such as these are not made. If you were only using technology B, people would not be so dumb and create an solution that you are now thinking about replacing.

I think that technology is not on the market yet, but I would be very happy to be proven wrong.

I think quality and knowledge issues are people problems, and need solutions that are based on fixing the people-based problems.

I really don't think technology is going to be a big part of that solution, even if geeks like me would like it to be. Technology is what we know, so it is easier to turn to. If all you have is a hammer, and all that.

Geir

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I do not feel trapped by this page, IMHO. It is ALMOST pure model -- it could almost be a simple XML file that's read and processed by some other functionality to produce the final page. But we didn't need to go to that level for our stuff, we just let the JSP processor do all that work for us.

The other nice thing about this technique is that it follows the golden rule: make the code better when you leave it. There's no reason to have to go through and make sweeping changes all at once. You can go as fast or as slow as you like.

So, if nothing else, I hope maybe I gave you some hope that whatever your JSPs look like now, perhaps you can get them better.

Re: Switch to PHP now for this reason

Isn't enjoying your work every 15 minutes the best thing we can hope for?

Maybe we should start learning PHP.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

The thing that annoys me about this is that Java is a very simple language (minus generics) and really very easy to learn. It's all of the crazy stuff that we do with it that makes it complicated. There's just a lot of stuff that is over-complicated.

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

The thing that annoys me about this is that Java is a very simple language (minus generics) and really very easy to learn. It's all of the crazy stuff that we do with it that makes it complicated. There's just a lot of stuff that is over-complicated.

Don't use them. Use plain Java and JSPs, or pick a framework inspired in rails, frameworks over coupled, and heavily based on code generation (but no very much round trip) but oriented to say "oh no hands, what easy".

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

I think that looks pretty nice. But it looks nothing like what I have to work with. I'm in 'how do I get from there to here' hell. I'm in the actions, then the jsps, then struts config and back to the jsp to look at some javascript and then to some beans etc. By the time I find what I'm looking for, I can't remember why I was looking for it.

One thing to note too is that there is not a lick of Java in that code. And, AFAICT, you could implement the interpreter for that with pretty much any general purpose language. I have no problem with the above. And Java is a good language for implementing that interpreter, IMO.

My original point was obviously not well stated. The point is that a lot of developers that are not already well versed in Java see it as an extremely over-complicated platform. The thing that annoys me about this is that Java is a very simple language (minus generics) and really very easy to learn. It's all of the crazy stuff that we do with it that makes it complicated. There's just a lot of stuff that is over-complicated. Do I even need to name the example? The niceness of the above will always be tainted by the kind of JSP I am working with.

And yes that does give me some hope. I'm not really keen on learning it but maybe I can get the person who needs help with this so often to learn how to do it.

<%@tag description="Simple image tag" pageEncoding="UTF-8"%>

<%@attribute name="src" required="true"%>

<img src="${request.contextPath}/${src}" border="0"/>

PHP is easy, but Java scales better

Re: Why most large-scale Web sites are not written in Java

PHP is for code junkies who say the word " cool "every 15 minutes. :-) It cannot scale and its very page centric. PHP guys just accept it, you have not done any serious enterprise development with PHP. A few registration forms, a few graphs and forgot password pages is all what you can do with PHP.

OO history

I was talking about "real world" not prototypes or papers.

Google runs it

Funny how the author won't allow this comment on his site!

Simple sites don't need J2EE

Re: Funny how the author won't allow this comment on his site!

When I posted a comment along these lines to his site, he apparently deleted it(?) cuz it never showed up

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