> "Startups" and "enterprise systems" are, in many (most? all?) cases, worlds apart in terms of needs.
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that they were; more that the wide adoption by both enterprise and academia has driven the development of a great number of world-class libraries and platforms in java.
Having GD embedded in PHP makes many image processing tasks far easier and less painful than trying to do stuff using Java image libraries (for example).
"It's virtually the default choice for enterprise systems" then "I just don't understand why java is not better embraced or more widely adopted amongst the startup community"
"Startups" and "enterprise systems" are, in many (most? all?) cases, worlds apart in terms of needs.
I say this as someone who's done PHP for 14 years and Groovy/Grails for 3.