In terms of underlying implementation, I would (not too surprisingly)
suggest something similar to diatheke--that is, written in C. It allows
easy porting to different platforms and between CGI, ISAPI, and whatever
else may lie out there. I don't think the perl portion of diatheke is
necessary anymore because it was primarily aimed at catching things with
regexps that are now explicitly marked.
if you want to write in C, you need to deal a lot with memory allocation, but the performance is definitely better.
If you use something like perl, it will be faster to change and you won't need to worry too much about the memory allication. The garbage collation help you a lot there.
I think the perl or php like will give you faster prototype speed with reasonable peformance.
I still think the focus should be on the User Interface instead of underline technology. As today, the lacking is a good user interface which is powerful and rich. Most of the UI I saw on Bible web site is not powerful enough. For example BibleGateway provide a lot of content but user interface is really 5 years old kind of technology.
