I hate the articles that proclaim one technology dead because another supplants ONE USAGE of that technology. Web frameworks for Java are cumbersome and a pain in the ass. However, Java is really good for things and can work nicely side-by-side with AJAX, Flash, PHP or whatever other front-end technology you want to use.

The fact is, programming a stateful, multithreaded application on Java is extremely easy, and in certain circumstances, a stateful application with multithreaded capabilities comes in very handy. I'm thinking things like artificial intelligence applications, messaging, delayed database writes, etc.

I have programmed sites that are PHP, with a Java multithreaded application used to handle certain transactions or self-organization of graph structures.

I thought this whole Web 2.0 thing was about open interoperability?