wrapping a business model around a the availability of a third party is a doomed to fail idea. Craigslist specifically is probably the worst offender on the internet right now regarding sharing functionality on their site. They spend millions of dollars per year on anti-spam and code to prevent users from using their web site. This being said, it will only be a matter of days or weeks before your code needs to be retooled to using proxy networks because your netblocks are all firewalled (this happens automatically).... So, anyway, good luck, you're going to need it.
another interpreted language running inside of an interpreted language... sweet. All we need now is to write a perl interpreter in Lua and then run it inside of the javascript Lua interpreter and we'll really see the scripts slow down to a crawl.
The question is not is opentable worth it, the question is this question worth it being posted on this site, or is it just completely irrelevent drivel? I'd say the latter is true.
Oracle's lawsuit against google was the last nail in the coffin for Java. If I were you, and was forced to using java code, I would definately either use gcj to compile directly to native object code, or use an oracle supported JVM.