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All I get in Firefox is a black screen with light gray text saying "Symantec Connect Loading Your Community Experience". Checking the error console reveals a JavaScript error that "occurs when $compile attempts to fetch a template from some URL, and the request fails." If Symantec's web site is fragile enough to completely break when a JavaScript file fails to load, why should I trust Symantec with anything?

The caveat to the rest of this is that I'm somewhat new to the web development frontier. (a yearish of unpaid experimentation)

Having said that here are a few technologies/languages that I find highly useful, perhaps you will too.

Redis, everyone needs a cache/queue, if someone says otherwise they're lying to you. The really cool part about redis is that operations done with it are (mostly) atomic at the operating system level, and it has persistent records of transactions, which sets it far apart from its other competitors. Redis is something I would use in any sort of web application backend.

At least one of: rails/vibe.d/yesod/spray. These tools, while not ideal solutions, are extremely useful for maintaining separation of concerns, as well as rapid prototyping, I would consider knowing some framework essential.

Ember.js/angular.js are both javascript frameworks that are extremely powerful, the necessity of these increases with the more interactivity you want, they're probably a bit overkill for most webapps, but I'd definitely recommend looking into one of these at some point.

Foundation/Bootstrap are frontend frameworks for easily organizing the layout of your pages and styling them, again, for simple projects these will probably add more complexity than necessary to the project, but these are another thing I would consider essential.

Postgresql is a rdbms similar to Oracle that has very powerful/fascinating features that no other db system has such as hstore which is essentially a key value store that allows you to input whatever in a column, which is great for unstructured/semi-structured data (e.g. user uploads). Mongo can't beat an ACID compliant json store. ;)

I could go on for a while in this direction, but I hope this helps.

Personally, I use rails/ember/foundation for frontend stuff and use spray/redis/postgres for the backend, they seem to fit my workflow the best and solve the problem at hand the most effectively.

Are you one of these people who suggests JavaScript isn't a “real” language? Would it help to know that I have applications in production that service thousands of requests per second, accessed through rich, stateful clients that are loaded once and talk to the server without reloading the page?

JavaScript is probably the most powerful, versatile, and accessible language around these days.

Far better than HTML5/Javascript.

I doubt it. Qt is nice but depending on what's being developed, HTML5/JavaScript can be the superior solution.

Besides, HTML5/JavaScript has so much momentum and is moving so fast that I'm afraid Qt will be irrelevant in a few years.

Check out this app.
https://moqups.com/
A native Qt app would have made the experience clumsy.

There are so many great JavaScript libraries in development that it's hard to pick one. Here are a few that you should keep your eye on though.
http://www.meteor.com/
http://angularjs.org/
http://emberjs.com/
http://dojotoolkit.org/
http://backbonejs.org/
http://jquery.com/

I'd argue if that's the case, you're doing it wrong. Java was designed to be ubiquitous and to provide that write-once-run-everywhere capability that we needed, but hasn't succeeded arguably one of the worst languages ever created (weak typing, too!). Surely there's something bigger here than you or others are willing to admit.

You mention tool-chains, but it appears implicit that you haven't noticed that same trend web development. It's moving away from manually using HTML5 APIs, DOM manipulation (because the DOM API can fuck itself, for all we care), etc, and more towards the development of widely used, open, stable, and mature libraries and frameworks that provide incredible speed and agility in authoring. Look at AngularJS. It has the potential to replace GWT at Google as a platform*. Wow. It was designed to make development of web interfaces faster than GWT, and in fact, that's the very story of its birth.

No offense meant towards you or anyone else who finds themselves in a similar boat, but in my experience, the case is in general that it's a simple case of doin'-it-wrong. I typically hear this from people who WANT the web as a platform to fail or to be bad, and so they create this huge barrier akin to noticing that C lets you use inline ASM and then taking that as "C is basically just writing ASM, how can anyone get anything done with this?". The web has within it a beautiful and rapid basis for application development. Try to get in touch with it, your life will be simpler.

And towards the future: we have potential prospects like Dart that could succeed Javascript in a few years, we can hope. It's substantially better as a language fundamentally than JS but remains quite simple to use, especially for JS veterans, and for anyone familiar with C or Java. Right now, it has terrible performance, so when V8-level JIT-fu is applied, I suspect Dart will be the fastest web-borne language in existence (strong typing means the JITC can do a much better job without needing to rely on deoptimizations due to type inference failures, which are essentially the cache-misses of JS). The future is full of possibilities for web development. Embrace it, and encourage sanity. It's easy to belittle something, it's harder to improve it.

* I tried to find this reference, I believe it's in one of the I/O 2012 videos, if you care to find it.

I recommend AngularJS, great for client side programming of AJAX web-applications. It is all HTML/CSS/Javascript and is server agnostic, so you can use whatever fits your needs server side.

Best of all, the testing toolkits coming with Angular are great! You can finally do testdriven development of the client!