I'm walking the same road, been working on the Java platform for 8+ years. The recent trend of new languages on top of the JVM is really exciting, so you have s

I'm walking the same road, been working on the Java platform for 8+ years. The recent trend of new languages on top of the JVM is really exciting, so you have several options to investigate without trowing away all your existing Java knowledge. Groovy + Grails is a great platform and it feels like a grasp of fresh air, but there is also Clojure (with an emerging ecosystem), JRuby (and you can run Rails on it), Jython and Scala to name a few other options.