so you want to get web programming right, eh?

Programming should be done in a decent language. That language should be the same on client and server (and I won't tell you why).

All web scripting somehow started with JavaScript. You could embed it on your server side if you really want to.

One can target JavaScript (and also targets ActionScript) with the haXe language. It also has a server component, going through an Apache plugin.

The Links language promises to compile from a single source database updates and Javascript bits in your page.

OTOH, one can get a nice language, XML capabilities and leverage the whole Java shebang using the Scala language. However, the whole backend-multiplexing thing is missing as of yet.