Yeah -- I definitely recommend JSP + Java servlets. For development environment, Eclipse 2.0 just kicks a$$ (www.eclipse.org) -- and it's free. Grab Apache Tomcat or JBoss for a development app server (also free) and McKoi or MySQL as your development database and you can save a ton of money on oracle developer licenses. We do all our development on Tomcat w/ Cloudscape developer and then towards the end of development we move it to Oracle on Tomcat or Oracle on WebSphere to do testing. It works out pretty well for us.

I definitely agree with wfaulk -- get someone who can do the page design, layout, and navigation -- programmers suck at that. What we usually do is discuss how the basic flow will work, then have a JSP/HTML person go off and do nice looking pages while the developers go write the backend stuff (and sometimes REALLY ugly versions -- simply html w/ links just to test their stuff). Then once the API's are done, we join the nice JSP's with the code from the ugly ones and then we're good to go.

I don't have much PHP experience, so I can't really comment on that, but I've been doing Java stuff for a while now, and there are some pretty cool things in there to work with.

Definitely look at Eclipse as a development environment -- it takes JBuilder over it's knee and delivers a series of spanks.

Mike