Score one more in the "war" of Java versus PHP for server-side technologies, at least according to this posting at InfoWorld.

In 2000, the U.S. General Accounting Office(GAO) developed its own Web-based survey application using a combination of the open source PHP scripting language and the commercial C language. The GAO chose PHP over Java for a couple of reasons, not the least of which was security.

"Java had some security issues for us, so that was off the table. PHP was just a better fit for us because of its ability to embed things with HTML pages," says Kevin Dooley, senior IT specialist at the GAO and mastermind behind its survey application. "And of course it was free to try out, which makes a big difference."

Finally, someone taking advantage (and being open about) the fact that PHP is freely availible. Match that with MySQL and you have a killer combination. And, of course the most important reason for the choice:

What clenched the decision was that many agencies the GAO interacts with do not allow Java on browsers for security reasons, nor do they allow cookies to be stored on machines.