I am from Azerbaijan, and I can say that having natural resources doesn't make a country rich. In fact, resource-rich countries usually end up poor.

This actually has a name:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

It happens when a country doesn't have enough developed institutions, and finds out that they have natural resources. Having money in the country gives comfort and freedom to public officials, and they try to stop the development of those institutions or completely destroy them. As a result, it leads to lack of democracy which itself leads to lack of economical growth. In case of Azerbaijan, the country started to export its petrol just right after getting its independence from the Soviet Union. At that time it was a new country, and didn't have any proper institution. In general, it is an unfortunate situation which is extremely hard to fix.

The only reason why the country isn't rich is because all the gains from those natural resources are being siphoned off to fund the lifestyle(s) of corrupt public officials. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not only corrupt public officials, they end up in the coffers of large corporations too.

Azerbaijan seems to have done a better job utilizing their resources to boost the economy than most other ex-Soviet countries (including Russia, even), just looking at its economic growth since independence.

I have the same problem nowadays and think about migrating to Java for web development. I heard about Play! framework very much. Do you think Java is a good idea for web over Python and Ruby?

Many people (myself included) find Java too limiting. Many others like it.

But even Java is so much better than PHP. If you like it, go for it.

Actually, I find Python and Ruby much more interesting than Java (actually, Java seems as a boring language :) ) . But since Java is general purpose language and it's known as market skill, I want go for it.

Python and Ruby are both general purpose languages, and both also run on the JVM.

Knowledge of Java can be useful though, as terrible as the language is.

Python and ruby are just scripting languages - Java is a structured type safe language which is battle hard. No comparison!

Don't be silly. All three languages are of similar maturity (in fact Python is even older than Java) and all three have been "battle tested".

The only thing you might argue is that the JVM is a better runtime than CPython or CRuby, and for that there's JRuby and Jython.