Hi Ryan,

I can confirm that Java runs on the Raspberry Pi, and in particular the Java 8 
JVM has very good performance (relatively speaking) on the Pi, because the 
JIT compiler has support for ARM hardware floating point operations.

As Sean said, the Pi has limited computation power. If you're thinking about 
value for money (bang for your buck, so to speak), then x86 remains a better 
choice.

On the other hand, if you're interested in island models and experimenting 
with distributed EC, the Pi's make an ideal low-cost testbed with a massive 
community and well-supported Linux distro's.

In fact, we liked it so much that we bought 60 of the things :-)

http://raspberrypicloud.wordpress.com/

Cheers

David