Question : Java vs. php

I work in a the software industry.  Think Mainframe software and I'm the PM on our web products.  Traditionally, (meaning before me) all our web work was done in Java.  We have one product on the market and we are creating our second one, which is a fairly robust db application with lots of db processing and graphics.  Our framework is jquery augmented with GWT.  Our web applications run on Tomcat servers and use home grown middleware  to work with a  MySQL or DB2 database.

Recently, one of our mainframe products (not mine) extended their application to have and email/web page component and it was done in php/html.  there is now a movement to standardize the shop on php.  Yes, this means rewriting my two applications.  The civil war starts next week, if I read the tea leaves correctly.

I'm looking for some straight info on making the right decision.  Am I better off bowing to the pressure and telling my sr. java developers to learn php or do I develop a strong argument to standardize the shop on Java?  I feel like I'm in thunderdome (2 men enter, 1 man leaves) and the php proponent knows nothing of web/java development, but he is the fair haired son.

Any help you have is very very very appreciated.  I'm reasonable code savvy, but my development expertise (if you can call it that) is VB/SQL and an understanding of user behavior.

Thank you so much.

Answer : Java vs. php

I agree that there is no point in rewriting everything in PHP.  It wastes time, and time is money.

However, the two languages are similar.  After knowing Java for a couple of years, PHP was not hard at all, and I could still use either my NetBeans IDE or Eclipse IDE.  So, if you want your PHP developers to learn Java or your Java developers to learn PHP, this is not a problem in my opinion to worry about.  It'd be very easy.

There are a lot of great features about the PHP language:  typeless variables, heredoc syntax, readability, etc.  I would say some cons are less information and control over errors, not as good unicode support (if you're using other languages besides English), and less object-oriented design as Java (you can have classes, but it's still a lot more like C than C++ or Java).

Here's a link I found:
http://www.c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki?PhpProsAndCons

I love PHP and Java, so it's hard to say really.  And like everyone has already said, with a large system, you can't beat the heavily object-oriented design of Java, while PHP shines in easiness, speed, and readability of the data going out/coming in (you can look at a PHP file and pretty much know what it will look like).