Well, not quite — but the rise of lightweight languages like Perl and PHP coupled with the Apache web server and robust yet free databases means the bloom is a bit off the rose for Sun’s flagship technology. The recent explosion of tools like Ruby on Rails and AJAX just mean fewer and fewer projects end up using big, bulky, slow Java on the web, and we all know how painful Java on the client can be. That Chandler is Java-based pretty much means I’ll never use it — it just can’t be fast enough.

Sure, my company is using it — but we started our development a year ago, and with a Java-focussed team we knew and trusted. If we had it to do over again, I feel sure we’d have built our product using one of the technologies listed above for much less cash.