I’ve stumbled upon a very nice interview of James Gosling, the father of Java, where he discusses about Java and its future compared to LAMP, Ruby on Rails and AJAX.
Personally, I agree with James. Every one of those solutions has its niche. Java (J2EE) whether streamlined or not is good for mission critical applications. And I love my LAMP weblog and photo album.
He mentionned two scripting languages built atop the Java virtual machine: Groovy and JRuby. I have to check them. I am a programming language maniac :-)
(Image courtesy of C|Net News.com)