Why use Java?

Java is a language and environment backed by some of the most influential corporations in the field (IBM, Sun, Oracle) and with a track record since 1995 can be considered a stable and mature vehicle for software development. Java has been used in the largest scale environments for enterprise-scale mission critical applications, and combines benefits of extreme stability, flexible deployment and ease of development.

Stability: Built into Java at the philosophical level is the principle that applications cannot crash, still less can they crash their host machine. Every error condition in a Java program can be caught, inspected and presented by the running application to the user.

Flexible deployment: Java applications enjoy the widest range of possible deployment strategies, ranging from tiny applets in web pages and small mobile devices to full-grown applications delivered as shrink-wrapped desktop products. Java's inbuilt portability allows the maximum possible sharing of code between products for these environments.

Ease of development: Portability and stability themselves increase the efficiency of the development process and allow more powerful and robust applications to be developed for the same development effort. Furthermore, Java, being a "clean start" environment has benefitted from the philosophical and practical experience garnered over the previous 40 years of software development.