I keep wondering how Java compares to Go these days. I'm not advocating Go, just wondering how much of an advantage Java has for server-side "web applications and services" for new businesses that are the usual small to medium scale with a single-digit number of developers and no legacy vs giant enterprise scale.
It just sounds as though the advantages of Java help large, complex systems of services and developers more than they help the vastly more numerous small-med systems.
Can someone with experience comment, because I'd like to understand the options a bit better.
This startup: https://www.kashoo.com/home was built by a husband doing all the tech, and a wife doing the non-tech part. The app was written using Java and GWT. Can the husband roll faster if it was using Rails? probably but not significantly.
Another anecdotes: I was part of a team of 3-4 developers delivering a portal solution for British Columbia compensation board (WorksafeBC, http://bit.ly/1QhUH8L NOTE: it's a few pages of PDF to show the size of the app).
The thought of Java is slow, not agile, and probably overkill for small team, small project, small this and that is probably not warranted.
I've mentioned this in another thread: choose Java and you'll set for at least 5-7 years with minimum problem, focus on solving business problems and less on infrastructure, upgrades of software/libraries, choices of latest du jour). Those open source libraries are damn solid and I very rarely need to worry much whenever I upgrade those libraries. Open the pom.xml, bump up the version number, sit back and enjoy the latest version.
Do you want to write a mobile app? 1/2 of the popular platform is already covered with Java so you just have to worry about the other one.
I'm having a very very hard time justifying the use of Go for "Web Application". I just can't see the benefit over Java (I'm scoping this to just those 2 platforms).
Java and Go are pretty similar at the language level, and you're right that the advantages of both are more applicable in large systems. For a small business situation something like Ruby may well be a better choice.
Java has a more powerful type system (though still poor by modern standards). Both have weaknesses regarding error handling - Go encourages you to err on the side of repetitive code, Java encourages you to err on the side of handling errors only at very high level, I'm not sure which is worse. Java has a much bigger ecosystem and better tool support, though a lot of it is written for pre-C10K days and assumes a "1 thread per connection/request" model - but frankly for a small business type situation that's fine. The go concurrency model is overkill at the low end and not flexible enough at the high end, but if you're in the sweet spot then you can write code more efficiently there than in Java.
It just sounds as though the advantages of Java help large, complex systems of services and developers more than they help the vastly more numerous small-med systems.
Can someone with experience comment, because I'd like to understand the options a bit better.