if not CGI:

[Max]

I've never done anything on the web. I mean, never developed anything. 
(I've got accounts on dA and wikipedia and half-a-dozen other things; I 
know HTML and enough JavaScript to hack away at it when friends need help).

Mostly because I've never had anything worth doing: I've written a set 
of python CGI programs (an eCards site) and set up apache, just because 
I wanted to learn how. It used raw files; no database. And it sits 
there, working just about flawlessly, at http://localhost/maxecards/. 
I've even done a minor security audit, just to learn how (I met a hacker 
and he impressed me).

But now I'm ready to do it in the real world. Nothing complicated, but a 
real project. And I have to choose my tools. Zope, Plone, Django, what 
are these? I don't have to stick with Python, although it's my preferred 
language. I know Python, Java and C++. But I'm ready to learn Ruby if 
RoR is as good as they say.

I could do it in Python cgi (or mod_python). But it seems from all the 
hype that this is not a good way to write scaleable, extensible web 
applications.

There's a reason I'm asking here: I like Python. But I only learned it 
because I had incentive (30000 local monetary units in the computer 
olympiad; I won 10000). Is RoR incentive enough?

--Max