Well, I'm not for or against Java or any other language. I agree that there can certainly be "bad" choices for specific problems, but it's absurd to think that Java specifically (or COBOL) is some kind of scalability magic bullet.

<offtopic> It's been a while since I worked with PHP, but when looking at performance or distributing work I can appreciate the desire to migrate to a different language. I've always seen PHP as more of an over-ambitious template language (even though smarty and so on exist to perform this function on top of PHP). Basically I'm not surprised by your story. </offtopic>