The days of "all positive, all the time" for Java are long past - have a look at this article from the June 27th issue of Information Week:

Although more tinkering is under way, there's not much that can be done about J2EE's approach to Soap and XML messaging. "It can't be fixed. It's just broken," contends Anne Thomas Manes, a Web-services analyst with consulting firm the Burton Group and former director of business strategy in Sun's marketing unit.

Ouch. J2EE is the epitomy of the "complexity is essential" crowd - have a look at what Chris Petrilli said about that yesterday - very cogent comment, IMHO. Meanwhile, James Gosling confuses quantity with Quality:

Sun's James Gosling rejects such talk: "The amount of Web services being built with Java and JAX-RPC is huge."

There's a ton more VB and COM out there dude - is that an endorsement? Notice how he carefully avoided the J2EE question as well. That's not the funniest part though - have a look at this, from the Yankee Group:

"Innovation is happening in Web services. It's just not happening in the Java environment," says the Yankee Group's Gardner. "In a sense, [Java has] become legacy." Sun says changes are in the works to make scripting languages and XML easier to work with in a future release of Java 5.0.

The honeymoon is definitely over :)