I've recently started toying with the Play Framework, a Rails-alike written in Java. The other Java web development tools I'd seen all primarily featured a suffocating bureaucracy, but this one pulled a number of tricks to appear almost as concise as Ruby. My take-away was that Java didn't have to be as repetitive as I'd thought, just that most of the Java libraries were written to encourage that. Maybe that's easier to make Java more productive than Ruby more efficient.