Robust, high-performance back-end services where stability, tooling and a deep hiring pool matter more than moving fast.
It's chosen for the boring reasons, which are the right reasons for infrastructure.
Strong backwards compatibility, so upgrading a runtime rarely means rewriting the application.
The JVM is excellent at long-running, high-throughput services, which is where a lot of business software lives.
Profilers and monitoring that let you find a leak in production rather than guess at it.
A large pool of experienced developers, which lowers the risk of owning the system long term.
Payments, ledgers, order processing. Java's tooling for finding out what a live system is doing is the best there's, and that matters more than syntax when something is wrong at three in the morning.
Banks, insurers and logistics run on Java. When the other end of the integration is Java, being on the same platform removes a whole layer of translation.
Java 8 and 11 applications that need to reach a supported release without a rewrite. Common, well understood, and usually less painful than expected.
Overnight jobs, reconciliation, reporting over large volumes, where real threads and mature libraries genuinely help.
Most enterprise Java is Spring. We start by reading it and writing down what it does, because that document rarely exists.
Written for someone deciding, not for someone who already knows. Skip it if you do.
A compiled, strongly typed language that runs on a virtual machine, which is why the same build runs on any operating system. It's thirty years old, it's everywhere in banking, insurance, logistics and government, and its reputation for verbosity is largely earned and largely outdated.
Predictability under load and the ability to see inside a running process. When a Java service misbehaves you can attach to it and find out exactly why, with tooling that has been refined for decades. Very few platforms give you that, and it's worth more than concise syntax when money is moving.
Modern Java is much less verbose than the version most people remember, and it releases every six months with long-term support every two years. Java 17 and 21 are the ones to be on.
It's heavier to start and to host than Node or PHP, and a small service in it is more ceremony than it deserves. We would not choose it for a marketing site or a small API, and we'll say so.
Both are past the point where free security updates are straightforward. Getting to 17 or 21 is normally mechanical, and delaying makes it less so.
Enterprise Java outlives its authors more than most. Writing down the behaviour, from the running system if necessary, is the first job.
An application server and a manual release. Containerising it usually cuts hosting and removes the release-day ritual, without touching the code.
It used to be. Modern Java with a lightweight framework starts fast and runs in a small container, so the old objection largely no longer applies.
Yes, and with plain Java services. Spring is the common choice and we're comfortable in it, including inherited applications.
Yes. Most of our Java work sits behind an API that the front end and other services consume, so the language stays an implementation detail.
It's neither. The virtual machine is one of the fastest runtimes available, and modern Java reads very differently from the Java of ten years ago. What is true is that it's heavier for small services.
That's the usual arrangement. We take a defined piece — an upgrade, an integration, a service — and work in your conventions.
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