I'm not sure what you mean by talking about stuff going into the core with Java as "bloat," unless you're referring to raw download size of the JRE. It's by no means the same situation as with PHP, because Java has packages, while PHP does not. It can be quite maddening for quite a long time to figure out how one accesses one's preferred database in PHP, for example, since mysql_* and pg_* are both in the core (well, if you compile them in, they are).

You can write a reasonably functional (if verbose) program in Java without using anything outside of the java.lang package (although, heh, you can't process a file ...); OTOH, if you need to process XML and you have JDK 1.4 or later, or you want to serialize some expensive-to-construct objects in Java, you can do it without having to download anything new. Yes, the base API documentation is huge, but you can do a heck of a lot with it. It's kinda like shipping a lot of CPAN in the distribution.

It's by no means an official central Java repository of modules, and it's also by no means as comprehensive as CPAN, but the Apache Jakarta project has been developing reusable components, some of which are quite nice. I still prefer CPAN, but my point is that the Java picture is not as bleak as it is sometimes made out to be. Of course, for most textual processing, I still prefer to use Perl, but my view of Java is not as jaundiced as it used to be.

If not P, what? Q maybe?
"Sidney Morgenbesser"