<blockquote>> "I don't relish the idea of developing websites with Java."
</blockquote>
I didn't either, but to be honest, with a good templating system and some sort of script-like recompile-pages-on-the the fly capability (i.e. JSP), it's not nearly as bad as you'd expect, and it is nice to have lots of tools/other code to draw on + compiler & junit to help track down stupid mistakes. There are still more tools to be written, of course (good system to check/translate/recompile every page, in particular), but I've already seen big wins in my personal development with the existing tools.
I've worked in each and I think that Java can be made to be nearly as quick to write as Tcl (whether through custom extensions or industry standard extensions; everybody their brother and his pet dog sparky seems to be developing extensions and templating systems and scripting languages for Java web development these days, making it clear that plain Java isn't the right thing to do web pages with but tools that translate into Java can be pretty darned useful), and I sure as heck would not have said that a month ago.
It's interesting to note that the other big TCL-for-creating-websites user I'm aware of, Vignette, has switched to Java: <A HREF="http://www.vignette.com/CDA/Site/0,2097,1-1-731-1191-1282-1909,00.html#support">http://www.vignette.com/CDA/Site/0,2097,1-1-731-1191-1282-1909,00.html#support</A> It's hard to tell how it's gone since their "Technical library" is restricted, but here's an interesting quote to demonstrate the intelligence of technical analysts: "While previous versions of Vignette's software have had impressive functions, the company has lost business to rivals because customers didn't want to deal with its difficult-to-use programming language, Warzecha said. Vignette 5.6 should eliminate that handicap, he said." (http://industry.java.sun.com/javanews/stories/story2/0,1072,32855,00.html) - I say intelligence rather than stupidity because, as sad as that looks to all of us, I'm afraid it's an accurate statement and the analyst is probably dead on.
But in the end, it's a business decision: Writing something that will stand on its own and nobody else will ever see it? Use whatever you like (isn't that an argument for mod_perl? :) ) Want someone you've never met before to have a prayer of understanding it, without wondering why "# } blowup" is interpreted and dies even though it looks like a comment? Well, they're probably familiar with Java... and they may have an API you can use to speed things up, too.
Please understand I'm not trying to start a flame war, just saying that it's not the certain doom some seem to think it is. :)
