I agree that once you get a certain size of application, you effectively reduce the complexity of deployment to a small portion of the overall work. In those ca

I agree that once you get a certain size of application, you effectively reduce the complexity of deployment to a small portion of the overall work. In those cases, something like Java is probably appropriate. In fact, most companies leave Ruby/PHP for Java service once they mature. I was more referring to your statement of using Java over PHP. PHP's syntax may be approaching something like Java, but the differences between the languages are still so vast, that they are only similar in syntax.