What do you use for your templating engine? We are use struts2 as our framework and found that OGNL and struts2 tags are two orders of magnitude slower than straight JSP.

I'm thinking of ditching JSP and have PHP talking to our Java services via Thrift.

3.5 million visits is small in current internet terms. And now having a look, it is a small text message system. No media, no video, not many images. Sorry, but it's not a good example at all.

At peak it handles 500+ lines of chat a second. That's quite a bit more than twitter. It also has around twice the number of peak users than Meebo rooms. So although it's certainly not a massive site, it has taken some thought to scale.

Having big images/videos wouldn't really make any difference to which language you choose. That's just static media files which are irrelevant.

I really don't see how having more images on the page would make it harder to scale :/ if only the site were as simple as serving up some images...

>I really don't see how having more images on the page would make it harder to scale :/ if only the site were as simple as serving up some images...

Apparently that is all too hard for some web 2.0 startups.

Where is your site that receives 3.5M visits per month? It doesn't matter what language or platform you use. Handling 3.5M visits takes some thought. In fact, where can we find anything to support your language-bashing in your last few posts? I see you knocking down other people's suggestions without putting forth anything of substance yourself.

First, please take a deep breathe. This is a technical discussion and it doesn't necessarily need to have "a winner."

Second, please look my other posts 4 and 6 minutes before this one you just did.

On a C++ thread some people above say the thread creator should use Java. I refuted that argument with my opinion and reasoning. It is not bashing:

bash: - To engage in harsh, accusatory, threatening criticism. -ing When you deliberately attack a person using offensive and/or inappropriate language.

See on top of this page: "Suppose I wanted to write a C++ based web application... [...] But what if I just wanted to write plain C++?"

Can't Java people play along? Can't you guys even play pretend? There are very good comments in this thread (both pro and con.) And if you think C++ Web Applications are a bad idea, fine, say so and state your case. There was no need to bring up Java. Of course you are free to do so. But that allows others (moi) to counter-argue with you.

Thank you.

For the record, I am a C++ person, not a Java person. C++ is far and away my strongest language. Nevertheless, I believe that for general web app development, if you want something in the C++ family of languages, Java is more appropriate. At my startup we use a handful of languages for different tasks, C++ and Java among them.

I don't think anyone would have really jumped on the memory comment originally, but what made the thread asbestos-o-riffic however was the assertion that Java is inappropriate for a startup, which is, well, just plain silly.

But I never said that. I don't even think that. It depends completely on the startup's goal.

In a comment 15 hours ago I stated it's probably not worth it due to current cheap hosting prices.

You didn't, jgalvez did, and that's where most of this discussion forked off from.

I'm certainly not a "java" person, but I take objection to bashing a language like java with no reasons to back it up.

Web apps can work in any language (I wrote a couple in assembly once)...

Choosing the language is not really that important.