I strongly believe that if you want to have a solid base for developing software you need to know more than JavaScript and JavaScript on Node.js. By adding Java and Python FCC is helping people become software engineers.

I find it remarkable that many people ignore Java and Python and use Ruby or JavaScript on the server side. One of the biggest factors that should go into choosing a server side platform is the size of the software ecosystem.

The Java ecosystem is massive. Arguably the largest base of reusable code that the human race has ever created. Python comes second in some areas and first in others in the size of its software base. After R python has the best open source mathematics environment (and Python is much more deployable than R).

nderground runs on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), hosted on Apache Tomcat, running on Linux. This means we can write code in Java, Groovy or Scala.

nderground is implemented in Groovy and Java, using the Grails development environment. This has allowed us to leverage the massive Apache and Sun/Oracle software bases. We have also been able to leverage the Spring and Hibernate environments. In addition we’ve been able to make use of smaller, but still critical components like imgscalr (image scaling and rotation in Java).

To paraphrase, we have achieved so much because we are standing on the shoulders of giants.