Since you are asking about "rapidly building a web application" I think you also need to consider your hosting platform. If you use a framework that has full s

Since you are asking about "rapidly building a web application" I think you also need to consider your hosting platform. If you use a framework that has full support on one of the big PaaS services, you can save a lot of time configuring and maintaining your production and development environments. For my most recent web app, I chose Python/Django on Google's App Engine. I spent less than 15 minutes configuring the development environment and new deploys take almost no time. I also spend very little time maintaining the production environment. GAE also has a lot of built-in debug tools (logging, stackdriver) that have made managing my application simpler. There are a lot of such services now, including on AWS and in Azure.