yea exactly. the Java tools are not about lightweight/modern web dev it is about powerful commercially-developed libraries. If they could offer those tools with

yea exactly. the Java tools are not about lightweight/modern web dev it is about powerful commercially-developed libraries. If they could offer those tools without having to buy/house a bunch of proprietary hardware i think a lot of Java-haters would see the light. (fyi i am an ex-RoR guy who does enterprise Java now... moved over primarily to learn the JVM ecosystem because I don't want to be in web dev forever) That said, I do think the Java community should continue developing it's "rapid dev" sortof languages/frameworks (Clojure and maybe Scala/Play?) if they are ever going to attract start-up and small business types. But yeah Java gets such a bad rap... I've had way less headaches since moving over from RoR. Java is a little more DIY in terms of composing a toolset (if you happen to be starting from scratch -- many like myself are not) but it's all there & way powerful. I deploy a handful of pretty well encapsulated projects to Websphere Application Server and it's pretty much a breeze, plus the IBM products, for example (not Oracle I know...) have massive admin interfaces that a rapid dev team couldn't mimic/maintain even if they wanted to. The open source tools are great too, but as many like to complain -- Spring and the like "are just overkill for small projects". That may be true but why even put all this thought into your toolset if you are just trying to make small low-traffic CRUD sites...? Iduno, strange world.