On the Ez.no blog there's an interesting post comparing PHP and Symfony to Java and some of their own reasoning behind the choice of one over the other.

We are often asked, especially from our enterprise customers at financial institutions, why we decided to go with PHP and Symfony instead of a Java framework. And as we have actually re-considered alternatives both in 2007 and 2011, we know the answer pretty well. We also know firsthand how much PHP and the PHP ecosystem has matured and progressed the last few years, how Symfony2 and Composer provided a big jump forward, how PHP v7 and Symfony3 is positioned to provide the next, in the end making us very confident in our choice and in recommending it to others.

They then talk about some of the arguments of PHP versus Java, some that are pretty familiar to those in the PHP camp:

• PHP is "just a scripting language"
• Java is more scalable
• PHP's performance is bad in comparison
• Poor tools support for PHP

For each of these they link to more information and describe the current state of PHP and its ecosystem to help refute the claim. They then get into the Symfony portion, comparing it to similar Java frameworks, listing advantages like the large pool of Symfony developers and its vibrant community.