Why no love for PHP? 
keefe: I don't care for PHP because it's interpreted vs compiled, debugging is a pain and it muddles view and application logic! Separation of concerns is one of the key principles of software engineering. Also, library support is much better in Java and it's generally a more mature language. I really want to write my logic separately and unit test it against mock objects and this is harder with PHP. My preferred stack is Java server talking to jquery front end.