Ruby's easy but Java is quicker

Not much, really. There's several problems with it.

First, to take RoR and something as marginal a Groovy/Grails and extend that to a blanket "Java is faster" statement is misleading. It's fasters than those two. No more, no less.

Second, speed and scalability are not RoR strong points. Quite the opposite. While it's a fine development platform, those are two known issues. Every platform has weak points, and at this point, speed and scalability are two things the RoR guys are working on.

Third, it's pretty much moot for most folks. Consider the test:

Here's how the platforms fared: The Ruby on Rails deployment was able to execute about 2,000 operations per second (such as reading a database entry, or refreshing the Web page), whilst serving 100 users simultaneously. Grails executed just over 3,250 operations per second for 100 users. And JEE 5 trumped both of the others, executing almost 11,000 operations per second with 100 users.

Well, for most folks, the ability to execute 2000 operations per second while supporting 100 simultaneous users (on just 8 megs of RAM) would be more than adequate.

Finally, they stress that the tests are not proper benchmarks, as each wasn't tuned. You could very conceivably get much better performance from the scripting languages with proper tuning.

Bottom line: Java is going to tend to be fastest, but for most projects a scripting language may be plenty fast enough.

I would have been interested in how Django fared, though. I suspect it might have done quite a bit better than RoR.

Interesting seed. Ruby on Rails is still a newcomer to the web development world and in my opinion, it's a specialised framework targeting a particular niche. Ruby on Rails is intended for rapid development of websites which mainly pull data out of a database and display it based on what a user has chosen. It has yet to prove itself in the enterprise market which is what J2EE is targeting but scripting languages like PHP are making inroads in that area.

I don't have specific experience in the area that they have benchmarked but it looks like they are trying to see how these scripting languages perform in Java's main area and it looks like Java is the best performer there.

For a small business which won't be running a website that will need take a load as big as that, rapid development is much more of a bigger factor to take into consideration when choosing which technology is to be used.