[mgkimsal]

I'm a Grails advocate, and can be pretty productive in it. This is coming from someone with 15 years of PHP experience (sprinkled with some other tech), and I'm pretty productive in that as well. There are some aspects of projects I'm actually more productive in Grails in, which is a byproduct of the groovy/java language syntax than anything else. GORM is a dream to work with for 90% of the projects I do, as opposed to any PHP-based ORM, for example, and even Rails' ActiveRecord. Obviously just "imo"

Probably a bit off topic, but PHP/Ruby/Python/Perl scale up much easier than Java scales down. And there's fewer large scale problems/apps than there are smaller scale stuff, so we see far more usage of PHP/etc in most day to day work.