On the subject of JS, I've been messing around with Node lately. It's definitely one of the most powerful things I've ever seen for web development. Writing something in it takes some getting used to though. Everything ends up being arranged in an amazingly intricate series of callbacks due to the asynchronous nature of the API. I'm still working on a good way of structuring the code, but I like it so far. It seems to be a bright future for the web.