The Second Coming of Java: A Relic Returns to Rule Web | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com

In other technology twilight zone news, see Microsoft sails past Oracle in bringing Java SE to the cloud (PCWorld)

"If you know Java at all, you probably think of it as something from the late ’90s, a child of the original internet boom, a little piece of downloadable software that sent a cartoon mascot dancing across your Netscape web browser. You think of it as something that promised a world of software apps that could run on each and every one of your personal machines — from PCs to cellphones — but that ultimately failed in the face of endless security bugs and poor decisions from its creator, Sun Microsystems. “For the general populace,” says LinkedIn principal staff engineer Jay Kreps, “Java is some annoying thing that really out-of-date websites try to make them download.” And if you see it as anything more than that, you probably dismiss it as a way of building stodgy “middleware” tools that connect things like web servers and databases.
But over the past few years, Java has evolved into something very different. It has quietly become the primary foundation for most the net’s largest and most ambitious operations, including Google, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Square, as well as Twitter. “It’s everywhere,” says Krikorian."

The Second Coming of Java: A Relic Returns to Rule Web | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com