Not exactly a java fan here, but java targeted the enormous block of people writing in C/C++ for their enterprise servers, and gave them "machine-independence". Being able to upgrade your server, and not having to rewrite your app, was huge. The competition wasn't PHP, at the time; it was C/C++.

It's interesting in today's era of Rust, that people think of Java as failing to replace C++; in practice, it was only 90% successful, and managed to replace the vast majority of cases where people did use it.

About the only things that didn't get replaced were (some) desktop gui apps, and apps that were so tiny that they weren't worth the launch of the JVM.

Also - you have to remember that in the late 90's / early 2000's, Windows was at peak dominance, nearly 100% of developers at work were stuck with a Windows desktop to develop on. At the same time nearly all servers were linux or maybe solaris. So how are you going to develop on Windows and deploy on Unix? C++ was a nightmare, scripting languages were far from ready ... Java was really transformational in how it gave a complete, totally portable standard library in a mature language framework. All these things are take for granted today.

Yeah I remember steele saying they wanted to make c++ move toward lisp.

But you got me curious.. what kind of backend code was written in c++ ? did people write server side logic in it ? I remember seeing some Oracle C code but it felt like a strange thing and not a c/c++ land. But to be honest that's not my world.

C++ was quite common back in the day. Amazon began as a C++ monolith (obidos).

I honestly feel there was no competition in the early 00s besides PHP, and that choice came with tons of other issues, especially at that time.