I'm pretty sure you can't use Java for scripting, but I'm new to it (started attempting to teach myself through tutorials this week). You can embed Java applets in web pages and do some pretty neat things, though.And if you're going to have a protected part of your site with users and whatnot, PHP is definitely the best. Since it does it's stuff before you load the page (or before you reload, depending on what it's doing), you can't see it in the source. The only way to look at the PHP is if you're on a system with a bunch of users. For example, my school gives us a little bit of webspace with PHP hosted on a UNIX/Linux server and since we can SSH into it, anyone that has the right permissions can go through and look at it in VI. However, I don't think many hosts really do that so PHP is best if you want to have authentication.