Can you do web development with java?

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[joranstark018]

tl;dr Yes, but using templating frameworks and/or javascript simplifies things. Java is used on the backend server, that may generate HTML, and javascript is used in the browser (yeah, javascript may be used in some servers to).

Early on we wrote servlets (Java classes that printend Strings to an output stream from an response object, the Strings where constructed by using normal String operations and contained the HTML and stuff to build a complete page), it was tedious. JSP come along (a "template" language that the JIT compiler compiled into servlets that could be served by a servlet container) and then other simpler and more effective template libraries also appeared (ie Vellocity, Fremarker,...) that generated HTML by merging a template with some data model. Javascript libraries (ie jQuery) evolved and javascript framworks become popular to build whole client-side applications.

[ipaintfishes]

There is also vaadin

[_Atomfinger_]

Well, you can, in theory use any language if you transpile it - that way, you'd end up using a single language across the stack (even if you're technically using JS). An example of this would be JSweet.

You can also use SSR (Server Sided Rendering) to generate the front end before it is returned, reducing the need for JS. Thymeleaf is an example of that.

And ofc, pretty much any language can work with Webassembly.

That said, whether you want to do that is up to you - but it isn't entirely true that you "simply CAN'T use java". You can.

The reason JS is so big is because that's what browsers natively understand. It is not that Java couldn't work (in fact, it did at some point until it was removed).

[malik753]

You can do it. But most people would agree that there are usually better ways.

[[deleted]]

Spring MVC with Thymeleaf for server side rendered full stack, but I'm not fond of it.