Today in the information age, softwares, applications and the internet have become an integral part of our daily life. Not many people know what goes into the development of these softwares/web sites or the programming languages used to create them. Although there are a number of popular language options like PHP, Ruby on Rails, .net etc; Java is by far the most preferred when it comes to online retail stores as well as other businesses. This is because Java is by far the most stable of all the programming languages.
Stability is an important factor for businesses that plan on running there systems and their websites for years to come. New open source languages tend to undergo rapid changes and look very different in a span of just a few years. It is just a lot simpler to have a website based on Java as changes to the site can be made easily using the same programming tools. If you are a business owner with a website that plans to be around for more than a few years, you might not be using the same tech team for your entire life span. Chances are, ten years down the line, the web Solutions Company that you use would be different from the one that set up the websites for you. If your website was built using one of the new age programming language that a lot of developers think of as ‘cool’ or ‘cutting edge’, you might find that, at the end of ten years, that language is no longer in vouge and has been replaced by another ‘cool’ open source language. Now you have a problem because it might be a bit difficult to find service providers that still use that language. Meanwhile a language like Java is still around and supported by large companies like IBM, Oracle etc.
So yes, there are a lot of new open source languages in the market but Java is the most stable and secure option for any serious, long term business.