>I'm checking out John's suggestion of Ruby on Rails. It's got pretty good press and lots of jobs available. Looks interesting too. I'll check out Delphi also after I get a look at Ruby. Thanks!

I'm digging into php/MySql just for kicks. I've set up FreeBSD on a spare old machine and learned how to set up Apache22, PHP itself etc. Quite a lot to learn, but once in, it all starts making a lot of sense, and the instruction, albeit quite terse, is written for us by guys like us, not by hype producers and market spinners, i.e. even I was able to find my way around it :).

AJAX stuff seemed to be even more convoluted than anything I ever cooked up, with delayed callbacks (any request you send to the server must be received by something - and that something is your callback function). There's also two layers of code: PHP (i.e. generator-time, server-side, one-run-and-it's-outta-your-hands) and JavaScript (which can be added to, erased, changed, really code which can rewrite itself). And then all of that complicated stuff went out the window when I found two magic words: invisible iframe. It's trick equally ingenious to .left=-2000 :). From that point on, AJAX can be done easy.