[RNeff]

I brought in Java to our multi-company DARPA software project with the first public release, Alpha-something.

1. It was free.

2. Jave code ran unchanged on Sun/Solaris, Windows (95?), and Mac OS.

3. There were GUI components that would sort of look like Motif, Windows, Mac. There was no other multi-platform GUI library that was usable.

4. It had garbage collection. This was a big win.

5. It had the JNI so I could write a Java to C interface layer to the distribution library (COBRA). Later the vendor wrote a 'real' Java interface.

6. It was free, and available for download without budgets, purchase orders, management approvals, and multiple layers of no-sayers.

I had a GUI demo running on a Mac laptop, a Windows box, and a Sun box talking to our servers after one weekend day of programming.

We were not using web browsers or web servers in our system.

[Stanleyrow]

Yeah, I think the garbage collection was a big factor. Especially in comparison to C++. JS is not compiled, so the real competition was only C++. Still I would always choose it over Java :D something about the syntax probably...

[rossitblt]

I would add to that:

7. Java was easy to learn, compared to languages similar in features, such as C++.

8. Java is easy to debug. No memory corruption, core dumps etc.

9. Tooling: Java IDEs were fantastic! I cannot say the same about C++ IDEs, 20 years later.