The resurgence of Java

The majority of new websites (Web 2.0) use the LAMP stack, and other popular development platforms are ASP .NET and more recently, Ruby on Rails. Has Java seen its heyday?

Amazon's EC2, Google's Web Toolkit and Sun's open sourcing of Java may finally make economically feasible for web-companies to develop in Java.

For a development platform to be successful among web startups, it should have
1. A good IDE,
2. A variety of hosting services
3. A talent pool of programmers
4. Free code-samples and ready to use open-source software that users can customize.

While ASP .net and LAMP meet all these criteria, Java has always been tough to adopt because there weren't any cheap hosting services for a bootstrapped company to use.

Thanks to Amazon, a good language can now be used for things other than enterprise middleware services.

Also, Google's Web Toolkit now makes it possible for developers to develop web UI's using Java, and then convert them to Javascript.

So, if I could host applications like Daffodil CRM in an Amazon Elastic Cloud, and get it customized and integrated with my Web 2.0 website (at $12/hour), use one free development platform to develop a website that anyone with a CS degree should be familiar with, using Java finally makes economic sense.

I expect Java to add some caffeine to Web 2.0