That said, I do think the Java community should continue developing it's "rapid dev" sortof languages/frameworks (Clojure and maybe Scala/Play?) if they are ever going to attract start-up and small business types.
But yeah Java gets such a bad rap... I've had way less headaches since moving over from RoR. Java is a little more DIY in terms of composing a toolset (if you happen to be starting from scratch -- many like myself are not) but it's all there & way powerful. I deploy a handful of pretty well encapsulated projects to Websphere Application Server and it's pretty much a breeze, plus the IBM products, for example (not Oracle I know...) have massive admin interfaces that a rapid dev team couldn't mimic/maintain even if they wanted to.
The open source tools are great too, but as many like to complain -- Spring and the like "are just overkill for small projects". That may be true but why even put all this thought into your toolset if you are just trying to make small low-traffic CRUD sites...? Iduno, strange world.
Amazon gives you access essentially to mostly open source tools or licensing fees for closed source stuff. it seems almost a different market to me.
Iduno, the hosting aspect of the Java world is so weird. My Python/RoR friends try to tell me there is no good Java hosting & then I point out the fact that its right there on the Heroku they love so much. I think cloud-enabling Oracle will just make the massive power of the JVM more apparent with better tools (yes they may cost some money but so do Heroku add-ons)