It's one of the most scalable, robust, secure, proven mainstream web platforms available. And at almost any server-side scale it performs better than PHP, Ruby, and Python.
As far as mainstream languages go, only C and C++ have a performance and scalability edge, but C++ at least comes with more complexity. JVM seems to hit the performance:complexity sweet spot.
... and you have to work really hard to make C or C++ run any faster than the JVM. For all normal levels of programmer effort there is no difference or the JVM is faster.
As far as mainstream languages go, only C and C++ have a performance and scalability edge, but C++ at least comes with more complexity. JVM seems to hit the performance:complexity sweet spot.