The role of high-performance java (HPJava) based projects in the field of scientific computing is discussed. The domain of applicability of HPJava overlaps popular high-performance Fortran (HPF) language, while at a more language-independent level. HPJava falls somewhere in between classical HPF and message-passing interface (MPI) extremes. The slightly unusual parallel programming model of HPJava, based on multidimensional array sysntax and distributed arrays, is also discussed.