Users generally dislike java on the client side because the widgets don't integrate with their platform quite right. Java apps don't "feel right". A good web ap

Users generally dislike java on the client side because the widgets don't integrate with their platform quite right. Java apps don't "feel right". A good web app is generally easier and cheaper to build and better than a bad GUI app. I think the server is where Java shines. Good Java is almost as fast as good C (if it's not, you're using bloaty libraries or being cavalier with memory), and when something breaks you get a stack trace that a support team can make some sense of, and the build/dependency system is a lot nicer. Sun sold Java as a plug-together ecosystems. They encouraged a mindset of putting together big teams of developers who live in padded IDEs and lean on bloaty frameworks, and not to think about resource usage. This won a mental traction with companies who wanted to believe that software work and developers should be a commodity, but has lead to a lot of bad systems. The results cause people to have some strange ideas about Java, like that it's slow. The Java world places a lot of emphasis on inheritance, which may be an anti-feature. Before I became fluent with python I used to create thick abstract class hierarchies that aimed for perfection and reuse. In truth the result was a bloaty, brittle mess. Python's awful inheritance model forced me to learn how to think in ways other than inheritance. Your example technology stack isn't a like-for-like criticism. You're criticising Java because Oracle takes up stack of memory and because you'd choose to use hybernate and spring. Why can't you use lighttpd, fastcgi, Java and mysql? The rails ORM isn't sophisticated, and it'd only be a couple of days' work to hack something up equivalent in Java. The result will be faster than rails and less memory intensive. You missed the obvious advantage of rails over java for web development - a lot of web development involves heavy string processing, and the tools you get in ruby/python style languages for list processing and string manipulation are a luxury compared to what you get in Java! That was the main reason I moved away from Java for web work. With Java you try to build things to be configurable. You might need to do a different option later, and you know that it will be a laborious refactor. Whereas with scripting languages, the configuration language and the programming language are the same thing. So you just write the thing to do what you need it to do. And if you needs change a bit later, you throw away what you had without it feeling like the death of a child and then do the new thing and get on with your life.