I just noticed how quick Friendster’s response time is recently, then I notice that it no longer uses JSP but PHP. The difference is really notable, the move is surely welcomed by friendsters. Russel’s did a good observation here on why would Friendster “downgrade” from JSP to PHP, as usually the practice is to upgrade from PHP to JSP for scalibility and code maintenance. still learning..
Just last week my lecturer on Performance Planning told us that Java is good at rapid prototyping but really bad at performance. I think I am inclined to agree to his comment..
Gotta be kidding that Java is quick for prototyping?!
Once you have lay out all the steps you need to set up a J2EE back-end and front end to have everything connected working in the order that the Java architects want it to work, you won’t consider that it is “quick” in terms of prototyping. On the other hand, the VM does provide good performance when enough resource is thrown at it (Java is memory demanding), as it compiles and caches the JVM byte code into native code on the fly. The reason why many Java applications are so slow, is because of many layers for each method invocation because Java architects want to make everything “clean” and “generic”, which increases latency, which makes things slow.
Unfortunately, saying Java is quick to prototype and slow in performance is so ’90s, when Java as an interpreted language is compared head to head with C and C++. Today, Java is still not as fast as C/C++, but getting close. On the other hand, you would use scripting languages that provide some real-time evaluation for fast prototyping, like Python or PHP.