It's interesting that you think in terms of web app. I generally think in terms of data model, and then web app is a structure on top of that. Much of my backgr

It's interesting that you think in terms of web app. I generally think in terms of data model, and then web app is a structure on top of that. Much of my background is in delivering complex web applications with no javascript or other fancy stuff. Previous customers have wanted lots of functionality in as few (and fast) page reloads as possible, with lots of reporting on each page. This results in a small number of mega pages backing onto a 'Service Layer' which in turn sits on top of a schema. Multiple applications can be hooked into the domain model to preserve data integrity. I'm not as strong as many geeks I know at keeping complex things in my head. My experience of PHP (I've shipped apps from 3.0 to 5.0, but I've never invested enough time to know it well) is that it has weak language structures and weak object relational modelling capabilities - this makes it difficult to manage the sorts of complexity that I've encountered. For anything else, PHP is pretty much irrelevant, but when you're doing web development, it's definitely the swiss army knife. By way of comparison - in python there's a http interpreter in the standard library that you can bind to a webserver in seconds, and you can write a simple templating library in a couple of minutes too. It's got XML-RPC in the stdlib too that makes it ridiculously easy to offer services to other applications. Perl has similar stuff via cpan, ruby via rails. What more functionality could you need for a web app? I've found powerful object modelling to be critical. The Java platform has always been strong in this. One thing that is nice about PHP is that you instantly get to the point that you change something and then reload - bang you can see your changes. CGI approaches aside, that's not such an easy point to get to with the other languages I know.