what good is java to web develop?

is JAVA a best for web develop? please tell me,what is best for web develop? php? perl? JAVA?

thanks a lot

There are many fors and againsts for any scripting languages. The things to consider are : who is going to look at the web pages and what are they connections like?
home users can have small bandwidth connection via modem,
corporate can have higher bandwidth ranging from ISDN to xMB links
intranet users may have high bandwidth via local network and very little local traffic to the internal server.

So the decision is do you want serverside, clientside or a combination of both for processing.

Serverside scripting languages (php,perl) have advantages that the server does the processing and the results are sent to the browser. The resultant transmission is therefore relatively small.

Java classes are processed on the client side so the application is downloaded to the browser. Java does enable very sophisticated pages limited mainly by your own coding skills. Although they can take a while to download over a modem. Java will become more usable once higher bandwidth connections are the norm. People do get bored when waiting for a download. You know how it is if a page seems to be taking forever to load you only persevere for a short time before going elsewhere.

Boo.com was a company that relied heavily on java and according to some press reports the majority of there custmer base didn't have fast enough connections to make speedy use of their site. They went bust owing millions. Maybe they were ahead of the market but it’s still a lesson to be remebered.


Javascript has advantages of processing user interactions before submitting results/input to a server which is useful for field verification on a data input screen. Some people disable javascripts in there browsers because there are security implications of running someone elses code on your PC.

A popular combination is a severside language and javascript so you get the best combination to suit your users.

These are very simplistic views but I hope they will help in your decision. Personally I like PHP as it easily integrates with MySQL (both are free) and there is plenty of help available on the web.


Happy coding

Andy J


[This message has been edited by eaamj01 (edited September 13, 2000).]

[This message has been edited by eaamj01 (edited September 13, 2000).]

I am regular PHP user. I faced some problems for displaying pages in diff. browsers and diff. O.S. I think if one uses JSP alongwith Java Beans and swing. One will get benifits of both PHP & Java. For plain database connection only that bean has to be used. Rest you can use JSP instead of PHP. I don't know whether I am correct. Need some experts opinion.