If you were to log in, you'd be able to get more information on your fellow community member.
A few points from experience:
- I have tried and I am using XML and XSL (Microsoft implementation) and I found that it flies and way outperforms ASP. I would argue that there is hardly anything cleaner than that. In addition, I use ADO and MS SQL Server. I don't know about the Oracle/Java/TCL configuration, but I comfortably support 10 hits/sec on my 266MHz Pentium laptop on NT.
- If you use application/web server, you can keep some data in memory and cache it and scale far better than an RDBMS solution. It really depends on the type of application and data
- Java is compiled (JIT) and every decent servlet environment can detect a change in a .class or .jsp file and reload on the fly without restarting.
- Look at some PC Week test results and have a second thought about application servers and NT. There are also articles about MS SQL Server vs. Oracle.