What programming language to use?
matthewsimon: It's not as "hip" as Python or Ruby, but I remain a big fan of Perl for server-side self-hosted web/database applications -- depending on what you're building, you can often find pre-existing modules on CPAN that provide a lot of the plumbing you'll need.And of course, Perl's syntax is very similar to PHP, so the transition might be a bit easier than to a Python, although your milage will vary.Lastly, it's worth noting that the choice of server-side and client-side technologies are mostly independent... You can use either HTML/JS or Flash as the client interface to talk to server-side logic written in any of the PHP/Perl/Python/etc. languages discussed above.