I spent three long years doing Big Freaking Enterprise Java web apps. You can certainly do modern web dev in a Java stack (we were Struts, Hibernate, Spring, a

I spent three long years doing Big Freaking Enterprise Java web apps. You can certainly do modern web dev in a Java stack (we were Struts, Hibernate, Spring, and an internal framework). It just fought us every single step of the way, and every time we had to do something new (that couldn't be templates off of working code) they'd have to get one of our three best engineers to spend a week fighting the new library into submission. Sometimes the libraries won. The easiest way I can describe it is that everything you like about e.g. Rails was designed as a specific dig against the Java stack. I am told Play is less painful. On the plus side: Java devs are plentiful, the library support is worlds deeper than the ruby ecosystem (particular around enterprise-y needs), and it plays well with teams of dozens (which you will probably need). I honestly think "restricts your developers terribly" is not a bug for typical Java projects, since the outsourcing shops contributing lots of our code base would have been even more dangerous if the code didn't restrict what modules thy could break.