I don't know why but Java hasn't been mentioned even once. Java has seen lots of deployment, and I imagine some huge stuff might have been built on it, and it's open-source-ish. :)
PHP? It's well capable of handling it's business, you know. Facebook's front-end runs on PHP. And it's open-source. Ugly as hell, too. Ruby on Rails was another option, right? Has all the benefits of an open-source project with all the benefits of the 'proven to scale' argument? And finally, Erlang. Proven to massively scale in right hands, proven ability to deal with hugely concurrent apps... If it's good enough for Ericsson, right? I mean telecomm software: real-time, distributed, and how many people use phones (including cells) around the world? Facebook chat runs on it, Github has some components ported to Erlang, and generally, wherever real-timeness is a priority, it's unbeatable. So, it's not .NET vs web2py. It's proven-to-scale (they gave .NET and Rails as examples, iirc), versus web2py. You have open-source solutions other than Python/web2py. Frankly, I'd always bet on Erlang. But I never learn enough of it to get started. :) -- Branko Vukelić bg.bra...@gmail.com stu...@brankovukelic.com Check out my blog: http://www.brankovukelic.com/ Check out my portfolio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxbunny/ Registered Linux user #438078 (http://counter.li.org/) I hang out on identi.ca: http://identi.ca/foxbunny Gimp Brushmakers Guild http://bit.ly/gbg-group