I have been working with Distributeds for a while .. ever since the RPC, the arrival of Java RMI , CORBA DCOM and now .NET. I dont know but for some reason I like working with .NET a lot more than I would have liked working with JAVA's RMI. I admit its been a while since I worked with RMI in java but I dont think it still matches up with the lease manager idea in .NET. anyone care to comment on that?
I would tend to stick with PHP if it was a web based service or application. PHP is a lot simpler to work with when you compare it with java. PHP 5 has started filling in all those gaps in programming which often gave it the aura of a script kiddie language. Its leaning a lot more towards object oriented programming. PHP was designed for the web... java was modified for the web.