I landed at a large bank in 2000 just as J2EE was exploding onto the scene. Looking back it was the app servers that mattered more than the language (though the

I landed at a large bank in 2000 just as J2EE was exploding onto the scene. Looking back it was the app servers that mattered more than the language (though the language made the app servers possible). BEA Weblogic was particularly popular. Its text (later XML) based configuration made it easy to get going (more so than IBM's competing WebSphere, where somebody had been too clever and used entity beans for config, so you needed to work with a DBA just to get started). Weblogic also came with really good samples and examples, which covered pretty much all of the useful areas of the J2EE frameworks. Just about every app that made it to production started out with the sample code and got modified until it was doing what was needed. There were of course other app servers. Cold Fusion had a loyal following for a while, but never escaped out of web apps and into line of business apps. The move of J2EE and accompanying app serves from web to line of business (starting in the back office) was mostly down to productivity and skills. The main alternative was generally C++, which was viewed as harder to do and harder to hire for. There were of course many arguments over performance, but eventually the JVM got plenty fast enough and people learned to avoid the 'Bitter Java' anti patterns.