[trcollinson]

Full disclosure: I have been around a while and have written in more languages than I care to even share at the moment. Right now my go to is Ruby with Rails. However, since you say you are a junior level engineer with Java experience, why not stick with Java? Recently there was a great article on HN about using Java for Everything and it made some very good and logical arguments for going with Java. [1][2]

We see questions like this on HN quite often. When starting a new project that you would like to support yourself on, you must ask "Would I like to make a successful SaaS product?" or "Would I like to learn a new language/framework/ecosystem?". I am sure some would argue that the language/framework/ecosystem can really make or break a web application. However, there are successful business built on just about all of them:

Stackoverflow - .Net

Facebook - PHP

Amazon - Java

Bloomberg - Ruby (could have said Twitter until recently they are migrating to Java, interesting?)

Reddit - Python

DuckDuckGo - Perl

Orbitz - Lisp

OkCupid - C++

Of course many of these organizations use a number of languages and frameworks. The point is, when they started they used what they knew and went with it. My suggestion, start building! Then someday I can use your super successful application in a list like this!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8677556 [2] http://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/java-for-everything...