I myself am a strong proponent of Java. There are enough tools out there that take much of the tediousness of all the common functionality (basic CRUD, form handling, workflow, etc).
The real strength of Java presents itself after you've moved to production; I almost always am able to hand somebody an .ear or .war file and completely offload deployment/operations to somebody else.
As a plug for EJBs (a lot of the negativity around EJBs are carryoversr from EJB 2.1 and earlier), EJB-based application can be easily scaled by putting a request into operations for an additional app server and administratively changing the number of "processors" (session beans). App server failover and recovery is also fairly transparent as well.
Just my $0.02..