If anything, it was more popular; in 2001, Java was the "modern" mainstream choice for backend in financials and enterprise L.O.B. applications, where today it's simply the incumbent choice. People forget that Rails was a primarily a reaction to J2EE's hegemony over "professional" (to use the closest word I can think of to describe the concept) web backend development.
A significant fraction of our enterprise clients today are entertaining a new "modern" platform to supplant Java, like Clojure (in finance) or Scala (in startups). Maybe it's not occurring to people that Clojure, Scala, and even Groovy weren't options in 2001. It was Java, C#, or PHP, or Perl, or C/C++.
A significant fraction of our enterprise clients today are entertaining a new "modern" platform to supplant Java, like Clojure (in finance) or Scala (in startups). Maybe it's not occurring to people that Clojure, Scala, and even Groovy weren't options in 2001. It was Java, C#, or PHP, or Perl, or C/C++.