What is the "Java equivlanet" of PHP/ASP/etc.?

[Alphathree33]

I'm an old school web developer who used ASP and PHP for my server-side stuff.

I'm told that Java is the new wave. So what specific Java technology should I use on the backend to replicate what I used to be able to do with, say, ASP?

e.g. Process HTTP POSTs from forms, query strings, load data from a database, dynamically generate pages, etc.

Sorry, I know it's a horrendously stupid question.

 

[SunnyD]

JSP? http://java.sun.com/products/jsp/

 

[PhatoseAlpha]

Who told you Java was the new wave? If anything, it's a very old wave.

 

[troytime]

php and .net are still popular and evolving

 

[Alphathree33]

Here's more detail:

* This is a web application that, if successful, will need to scale to many users (e.g. tens or hundreds of thousands). The features are about as complex as what you've got on a site like Facebook, probably less complex. (It's not a social network though.)

* I'm building the prototype, but I'm actually the business guy. I have a more experienced developer who will be taking over the prototype (in particular the backend of it) in a month or two and running it from there.

* Said programmer is very experienced building complex systems, but doesn't have any particular "web" experience. He suggested Java on the back-end since that's what he normally works with.

* He's a smart guy and could easily adapt to whatever platform we chose. What platform would you guys recommend if not Java? And will it be able to scale to many users?

 

[invidia]

Java/Java Server Pages are like ASP/.NET. All 3 are still popular and useful.

 

[sourceninja]

If he's used to working with java, check out the google web toolkit. Java servlet backends and then use java/html/css front end. GWT builds the easy glue in the middle.

 

[BoberFett]

If you truly need massive scalability and this is a new website venture that's not going to need to depend on legacy systems, you may want to look into a cloud platform to help decide your development environment from there.

Amazon Web Services for example: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/#os

 

[NiKeFiDO]

p.s. - facebook is written in PHP.

 

[chronodekar]

p.s. - facebook is written in PHP.

Seriously !?! I always thought it was build with Microsoft Server 2003 or something...

-chronodekar

 

[Ka0t1x]

A lot of the newer stuff is written in PHP/Perl/Ruby(on Rails).

Yes FB, is PHP, with a custom DBMS (their own actually).

 

[Nothinman]

Seriously !?! I always thought it was build with Microsoft Server 2003 or something...

-chronodekar

Unless they're doing something funny with extensions to hide what they're really running all of their scripts end in .php.

The web server headers for facebook.com say Apache/1.3.41.fb2, but Apache runs on Windows too so it's possible they're using Windows Server. Although I personally, be leery of running such a large site on Apache for Windows. Especially the 1.3.x branch which, IIRC, didn't work nearly as well as 2.x.x does on Windows.

 

[Markbnj]

A lot of the newer stuff is written in PHP/Perl/Ruby(on Rails).

Yes FB, is PHP, with a custom DBMS (their own actually).

I've heard a couple of stories recently of large sites (MySpace comes to mind for some reason) either migrating off of, or thinking of migrating off of, RoR due to scalability issues.

 

[aceO07]

I've heard a couple of stories recently of large sites (MySpace comes to mind for some reason) either migrating off of, or thinking of migrating off of, RoR due to scalability issues.

Do you have any links? I was not aware that MySpace ever used RoR and haven't found any search results that link MySpace to RoR.

The last big story with RoR and scalability was over a year ago with Twitter and I don't know what ever happened with that. I assume they still do, but are changing some heavy processing code away from Ruby. For example from Starling to Scala.

 

[heat23]

I have experience with Java, PHP, .NET and RoR and my favorites by far are PHP and .NET. Even when I am working in a work environment that doesn't use these technologies, I always fall back to these.

 

[ivan2]

when you say back end do you mean the business logic and the database schema - object mapping code or the whole thing running on the server. it will take more than one technology in java to replicate the whole ASP or PHP API. look into EJB3, specifically JSF and the different kinds of beans. it's easy to use (that's a relative term as compare to old school JSP/Servlet...), and the coherence is *almost* there between the front end and backend. if you need the level of code generation that RoR has then in addition you can also look into seam. If you need easy ajax you can look at richfaces (ajax4java) or the google webkit, although if you end up choosing JSF as part of your front end, my feeling is that richfaces will fit your programming model a lot better.

 

[JasonCoder]

I've heard that RoR is a pretty bad hog but it's been a couple years... perhaps they've improved the perf a lot.

 

[ebaycj]

I've heard a couple of stories recently of large sites (MySpace comes to mind for some reason) either migrating off of, or thinking of migrating off of, RoR due to scalability issues.

Twitter did.

 

[OogyWaWa]

god, i HATE JSP and JavaEE. It has a lot of uses and can be powerful, but for the amount of complexty involved for doing smaller projects, it just isn't feasible IMO. Now, for bigass airline companies, yah maybe. ugh, stack trace is the devil >_<

 

[Markbnj]

Do you have any links? I was not aware that MySpace ever used RoR and haven't found any search results that link MySpace to RoR.

The last big story with RoR and scalability was over a year ago with Twitter and I don't know what ever happened with that. I assume they still do, but are changing some heavy processing code away from Ruby. For example from Starling to Scala.

I guess Twitter was the story I was recalling, as you and OogyWaWa both pointed out. I don't know what the end result of that was either.

 

[ahurtt]

god, i HATE JSP and JavaEE. It has a lot of uses and can be powerful, but for the amount of complexty involved for doing smaller projects, it just isn't feasible IMO. Now, for bigass airline companies, yah maybe. ugh, stack trace is the devil >_<

Poppycock. Java EE is as simple or complex as you want it to be. You don't have to use the whole ball of wax to implement a java jsp/servlet solution. You only need to use as much of the Java Enterprise platform as you need to meet your specific requirements. You can do something as simple as a pure JSP web application that's not much more complicated or involved than writing a PHP solution or you can develop an enterprise level multi-tiered solution with clustering/load-balancing/fail-over/scalability etc. . .As for stack traces being the devil, I suppose if you don't have enough programming knowledge or experience to understand the concepts of stack and heap and what they are for and what happens on each of them, then maybe yeah. . .I can see how stack traces might be confusing. A call stack is not something that is unique to the java programming language or the JVM. It is a common programming construct for most if not all languages. The one thing I will give you that makes Java EE a little more complicated and is probably where most people stumble is setting up the app server. It can be a little more intricate than say installing a PHP engine or something but not by that much. But once you've got it set up the applications are relatively simple to write and deploy.