Java is the most widely-used programming language in the enterprise, with over 9 million practititioners worldwide.  The Java language and Java Virtual Machine (JVM) are used globally by nearly all major commercial software companies (Oracle, IBM, SAP, etc.), as well as large-scale open source projects like the Openbravo ERP Platform to provide the performance,  developer productivity, and code quality required by mission-critical applications.    The large number of enterprise-grade open source infrastructure and developer tools and frameworks written in Java make it the obvious choice for major server-side software development initiatives.