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Java is great for solving many kinds of problems, but it isn’t the first programming language that comes to mind when application performance is a critical issue. Sure, you can try to work around this with more powerful hardware, but at some point, a program written in Java just isn’t going to run any faster.

Java and XML complement each other perfectly. “Portable Code, Portable Data,” is Sun’s tagline for describing how Java and XML work together, and it’s right on the money. One of the best reasons for using Java is its portability; you write for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), not a specific platform. Your application will run on any platform that has a JVM. Java supports Unicode from the ground up, so you have internationalization built right into your application; localization, of course, is another issue. It is a clean, easy-to-use object-oriented language that has gained widespread use and acceptance.

The title of this column, Java Matters, has a dual meaning. In one sense, it’s about the technical matters that concern Java when trying to use it under Linux. The other way of looking at it is to acknowledge that Java and Linux are intertwined such that whatever happens in one community is reflected in the other — hence Java matters to Linux, and vice versa. This column represents an attempt to bridge the gap between Java and Linux by providing practices for using them together.

Tired of serving up static Web pages with plain old vanilla Apache? Try adding a dynamic spike of Java to the mix with Tomcat.