I'm looking for advice on programming languages for web development. The particular project doesn't actually involve educational software, but I thought that the topic (approaches to developing a fairly complex web-based system) would be of interest to the community.

I'm involved in a project where we are developing a web-based system for searching a large database of news articles, blogs, etc. to find interesting related quotes.

The interface development of the project is sort of in the early stages. It's going to be a bit like a web search application, but we are aiming to provide additional functionality over something very simple like google. For example, we'll probably show lists or tables of articles (or just quotes), but we may want to let the user sort on different fields, mark texts to be store for later, etc.

We've been using ruby on rails for the interface so far (it was developed primarily by a senior undergraduate who had quite a bit of experience with rails), but we've found that rails is quite difficult to adapt and extend to our needs. We've also found that rails has a rather steep learning curve, with lot's of idiosyncrasies.

Do you have any suggestions for other web development languages/platforms? We don't need a million graphical bells and whistles, but having flexible and powerful ways to access existing data sources (e.g., mysql, special programs we might develop) is important.