Simson Garfinkel’s rant against Java looks like it was written about three years ago. Everybody knows that Java is slow and that “write once, run anywhere” is largely a myth. He also spends a lot of time on Java applets, which are rarely discussed these days. I’ve got a little message from the present for Simson — all the Java action these days is on the server. He briefly mentions servlets (referring to them as “applets inside Web servers”), but hardly gives them the attention they merit, being that Web applications written in Java are at the epicenter of the Java world these days. I’m not enough of a computer scientist to make a reasonable comparison of Java to anything other than Perl, but it seems to me that many, many companies are successfully building applications in Java these days, hateful though it may be.