franzelneekburm

By far my favorite is mod_perl (as I was recommending to the OP), this is of course a personal preference, but Perl is a natural choice in our environment (a small Bio-/Informatics shop) as all of our non-webified development is done with it.

mod_perl kicks ass not just because of its speed - a huge increase you get pretty much for "free" when moving from CGI - but its tight integration with the Apache request pipeline gives great flexibility and an overall "fun" environment to work with. I've been learning a lot about various deployment strategies, and it's just nutty what you can do

I've had some success with J2EE as well, it's not without its share of evils, but for large, complex projects it offers some nice benefits over the "scripting" style languages.

I've done a bit of work with both PHP and ASP (like so many, I've started on them), and while they do succeed in keeping simple things simple (mostly), but as the projects grow they tend to fight your better instincts - doing The Right Thing just shouldn't be that difficult. I have less experience with ASP out of the two as MS tends to be an all-or-nothing proposition, and so far I've tended to err on the side of "nothing"; though I have heard that some of their more recent stuff is quite nice indeed.

Hope that explains it better; I really don't want to start any "my language is better than your language" things, but I think the young un's should at least know more about what's out there.

Oh, and despite what Paul Graham says, LISP sucks for web development (there goes "not starting anything" out the window ).