"Having a background in PHP myself I'd say that Java is heavily geared towards enterprise and you will find it "heavier" than the scripting environment of PHP."
Having a background in Borland Delphi 1..2005 myself and many frinds of my with background in PHP I'd say that Java is amazing. If you use Java right and have all necessary tools and libraries http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/ instead of eclipse for example http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/ for cool one-liners bonecp for connection pooling Apache Click for cool web development freemarker (!!!!!!!) instead of Apache Velocity Spring framework (my love) JUnit and http://mockito.org/ (amazing mocking) etc ;-) You can kill PHP developers as children - joke
