Russell Beattie writes about the usefulness (or lack thereof) of complex Java design patterns and frameworks for simple systems. His argument is that using plain JSP + JSTL SQL custom tags will be just as productive as using PHP. I agree with the fact that a lot of well-designed, J2EE-design patterns-conformant systems really shouldn't be - the best example is TSS, which runs on top of a J2EE cluster, uses the full J2EE stack, and is worse than even the simplest PHP community software out there. J2EE is nice, but that doesn't mean you should use it for everything.