When is Java the right choice for Web-based applications [closed]

Question

I've been doing some research into taking my programming experience and moving into the java programming marketplace, due to a combination of personal interest and local market forces. As you can gather from the title, the vast majority of my experience has been in building web-based sites and applications, and I'd like to move as much of my previous experience as possible.

One thing that I've been unable to find a concrete answer for when should a website or web-based application designer look to going with a Java based solution, over other options currently on the market. What options would Java provide that would have a designer select Java as the basic coding language to base a project upon?

Thank you for any constructive replies that may arrive from this inquiry.

EDIT: I should have included the caveat of if other factors are equal, for example if hardware, software, developer skill in java is up to where they should be for such projects, and so forth.

Answer 1

The main factor is what your developers are adept in. If you've got a bunch of Java developers, go with Java.

Answer 2

Consider this also: Java tends to run on app servers where there is a persistent global program running, and separate threads/processes spawn off to service individual requests. However, if the main global VM croaks for some reason, your whole app can go down. The benefit of course is that you get application/system level resources that you can initialize and use continuously across all requests

Other environments like PHP basically tear down and rebuild the entire environment for each request. You can code in application level data persistence using a database, but you don't get it for free. On the other hand, if one php process croaks while processing app data, it won't kill the whole system , as the entire environment is just torn down/rebuilt for the next request.