If this is a project of real scale and has a budget to match, I would say avoid choosing a language based on available programmers.  Good programmers can learn a language for a project much easier than bad programmers can learn good techniques.  For large scale projects I've seen more success getting smart people who can learn your tech stack and choosing the right tech for the problem you want to solve then I have with the "use PHP because there's a lot of cheap PHP programmers" strategy.  That's not a knock against PHP (there are a lot of good PHP programmers too), but if you intend to get big enough to merit using a language with as much overhead as java you will hit problems with php.