Check out the lift web framework. It fits well with your web development skills, and it'll let you explore a new language, Scala. Scala, as described by someon

Check out the lift web framework. It fits well with your web development skills, and it'll let you explore a new language, Scala. Scala, as described by someone I know who has dabbled in almost every programming language I've heard of, is "Java and ML done right". It really is a gorgeous language. It has the OO-goodness of Java, Ruby, or Smalltalk, but the type-inferencing heaven of OCaml/ML. It combines object-oriented and functional programming beautifully. And it compiles to Java bytecode so you can interface with Java libraries if you really want to. It's worth checking out in itself, even if you decide not to get involved with the lift web framework. The lift web framework was developed in Scala. (Disclaimer: I'm actively involved in the lift community.) It's the brainchild of David Pollak, who is an experienced master hacker. He had done a lot of work with Ruby on Rails and had grown disenchanted with it, and decided to write a better framework. (Check out his "Web Framework Manifesto": http://blog.lostlake.org/index.php?/archives/16-Web-Framework-Manifesto.html http://blog.lostlake.org/index.php?/archives/16-Web-Framewor...) He hunted around for a language to write it in and settled on Scala. He's been developing lift for a little over a year now, and while it is still alpha software it has really matured a lot. The community around lift, while still small (and -very- friendly), has started growing recently. We just announced the lift 0.3 release, and there is an ambitious release schedule to get lift 1.0 out the door by early May '08, just in time for JavaOne. So it should be exciting times in lift-land. So come on in, the water's great! http://scala-lang.org/ http://scala-lang.org/ http://liftweb.net/ http://liftweb.net/ http://scala-blogs.org/ http://scala-blogs.org/ (scala-blogs is a joint effort of people from the Scala and lift communities)