A lot of smart people find themselves asking this very question, and they choose a lot of different answers :) Anyway, I vote for something in Python with SQLA

A lot of smart people find themselves asking this very question, and they choose a lot of different answers :) Anyway, I vote for something in Python with SQLAlchemy and either Werkzeug (maybe Flask, if it suits you) or CherryPy. Pyramid might also be good, but I haven't used it much. I tend to avoid Django because the ORM just isn't as good as SQLAlchemy, and the template language isn't as good as Jinja. Not sure why everyone is suggesting the standard enterprisey platforms Java and .NET. You control the server environment completely, right? Go with a dynamic language for development speed, then. The big ones for the web are Ruby, Python, and PHP. Of those: PHP is a mess of a language with no big advantages; Ruby and Python are both great languages with all the libraries you need (probably :), but I give Python the edge because things in the Python world tend to have much better documentation.