It's funny, one initial selling point for Java was as a rapid prototyping language. Because back then it was, relatively speaking.
I think in the big picture of a increasing speed supply (courtesy Mr Moore, for cheap cycle farms and cache; but also JIT compilation techniques), and comparatively fixed user speed demand (a gui only needs to be fast enough; network latency swamps many other delays), Java is now much faster than it needs to be (faster meaning performance, not development time).
Back then, you had compiled languages (C, C++) that were fast, and scripting languages, like python, that were not. Python was touted as a glue language. Anyway, Java was mid-way in terms of speed (being partly compiled and partly interpreted), and mid-way in terms of dynamic benefits (eg. garbage collected and runtime array bounds checked - but requiring static typing). That combination of ease of use and performance was a good fit for some tasks, at that time. As the speed supply moved up, Java became usable for more tasks. But as speed kept increasing, Python and Ruby and even PHP also became fast enough - and they had the ease of use of being fully dynamic.
To give a direct answer your question: agile/iterative prototyping is how startups compete these days (not on performance), and ruby, php etc are better than Java on this particular attribute. Another aspect is that many cool new things are happening in languages other than Java - they have more interesting tools (eg. Sinatra), and more interesting energy in the community, because they attract those crazy, eager, young, passionate, enthusiastic early adopters.
Exceptions: where more performance is required (eg. Google uses a lot of Java; and it's the basis of the Android platform and others); and for the Enterprise; and also where type-safety (for reliability) is more important than agility (though ML-based languages have some of this market).
Note: a startup can tackle any problem, not just consumer-facing webapps. I think webapps get disproportionate publicity (because they're on the web); and web forums (like this one) favour them.
btw: I remember Java's younger years, I'm still a fan, and I'm using it in my product development. Java... some one still loves you.
> Another aspect is that many cool new things are happening
> in languages other than Java - they have more interesting
> tools (eg. Sinatra), and more interesting energy in the
> community, because they attract those crazy, eager,
> young, passionate, enthusiastic early adopters.
Of all the comparisons I've heard, this is one I'd say I'm dubious about. There is still a LOT of activity in the Java space, and lots of cool and interesting tools and libraries continue to be written in Java.
Off the top of my head, I'd mention Lucene, Hadoop, Weka, Mahout, Tika, HornetQ, UIMA, GATE, Camel, Jackrabbit, DERI Pipes, etc., etc. This isn't too say that other languages don't also have lots of activity in tools and libraries and frameworks, but I think Java is still in pretty solid shape in this regard.
Most of the projects you just listed are several years old, and some go back more than five years. That's not exactly "new" when it comes to computing.
Yeah, but they're all being actively developed, so I'm not sure how much it matters when the project was originated. And that was just "off the cuff" of stuff I use or am interested in. There's other stuff out there as well.
Anyway, I'm not arguing that Java is the most active in this regard, just that this particular criticism - of all the ones one could level - is, in my humble opinion, relatively weak.
Don't confuse "development" with "maintenance". They are very different things. We see most of those projects merely being maintained, not radically improved.
True development is happening within the Haskell community, for instance, where they're taking concepts from various fields of mathematics and applying them to software development in ways that haven't really been done before.
Most Java-based projects are merely reimplementing something that somebody else has already done, or they're making minor, incremental improvements to a well-aged piece of software.
5 years ago was probably Java's sweet spot, in terms of cycles being used to help the developer, while still giving adequate performance.
It would be interesting to graph the average ages of the users of the popular languages; youth being a proxy for the (perceived) current best thing. When you're starting out, why wouldn't you choose that?
I think in the big picture of a increasing speed supply (courtesy Mr Moore, for cheap cycle farms and cache; but also JIT compilation techniques), and comparatively fixed user speed demand (a gui only needs to be fast enough; network latency swamps many other delays), Java is now much faster than it needs to be (faster meaning performance, not development time).
Back then, you had compiled languages (C, C++) that were fast, and scripting languages, like python, that were not. Python was touted as a glue language. Anyway, Java was mid-way in terms of speed (being partly compiled and partly interpreted), and mid-way in terms of dynamic benefits (eg. garbage collected and runtime array bounds checked - but requiring static typing). That combination of ease of use and performance was a good fit for some tasks, at that time. As the speed supply moved up, Java became usable for more tasks. But as speed kept increasing, Python and Ruby and even PHP also became fast enough - and they had the ease of use of being fully dynamic.
To give a direct answer your question: agile/iterative prototyping is how startups compete these days (not on performance), and ruby, php etc are better than Java on this particular attribute. Another aspect is that many cool new things are happening in languages other than Java - they have more interesting tools (eg. Sinatra), and more interesting energy in the community, because they attract those crazy, eager, young, passionate, enthusiastic early adopters.
Exceptions: where more performance is required (eg. Google uses a lot of Java; and it's the basis of the Android platform and others); and for the Enterprise; and also where type-safety (for reliability) is more important than agility (though ML-based languages have some of this market).
Note: a startup can tackle any problem, not just consumer-facing webapps. I think webapps get disproportionate publicity (because they're on the web); and web forums (like this one) favour them.
btw: I remember Java's younger years, I'm still a fan, and I'm using it in my product development. Java... some one still loves you.