I as well stand on java's side here. Too much of it's bad rep comes from J2EE (it's too bloated). Java has some very nice technologies written around it that ar

I as well stand on java's side here. Too much of it's bad rep comes from J2EE (it's too bloated). Java has some very nice technologies written around it that are quite powerful when utilized correctly (JPA/Hibernate being one of those) Quite frankly I think Java is actually _very_ good for web programming. IFF you are using the Spring framework(autowiring and transaction handling are very strong components of this framework) along with some nice templating frameworks (tiles, sitemesh) I absolutely love the Spring (MVC) framework and this is probably why I hold java in high regard.