so-crates

If you wanted to do anything multi-threaded, or distributed, Java makes it pretty easy.

I have not found Java servlets to be that cumbersome. I haven't tried the J2EE/Struts stuff.

PHP is good for doing simple things - but becomes a pain for large, complex projects because it is untyped.

Last time I tried Python, their DB support wasn't up to snuff, at least for the DBs I was using - PostgresSQL and MySQL(yeah I know - yuck)