We don't claim to be experts, but the we've found the following can be used to ease the pain...
Cheetah is a remarkably flexible, open source template engine.It solves lots of problems in a very simple way and integrates well with other tools. It is included in most Linux distros and Ebay and PayPal use it.
JavaScript! Oh why is this the only universal standard language for webpages.Gosh it's hard to get it right and then it's even harder to get it right across all browsers, actually when I say all browsers I mean Internet Explorer, that's one broken browser. Web development would be much easier if it didn't exist.
Anyway Mochikit is fantastic, it makes javascript just about usable, eases cross compatibility. Don't believe us? Check out the demos, and see if you don't say "I didn't know you could do that!" in the first 5 seconds.
Java is the grandaddy of rich web interfaces and was a ground breaking language when it first came out. Now it has
matured into a very usuable and rich platform. It can do things that I just can't figure out how to do in Flash....
Python is a scripting language we've used for our server side cgi scripts.
It is elegant and makes writing programs disturbingly easy, so easy you think you must be doing something wrong.
We find it a lot easier to read and understand than Perl too.
GraphViz is a graph visualization suite of programs written by scarily smart people at AT&T.
Our webmapper tool relies on this program to layout the maps once we've generated them.
If you think this is a trivial problem, then you're wrong. Laying out graphs like this is one of the hardest problems around. We're extremely thankful they've made it open-source.
This is a neat use of Firefox's extension capabilities.
It will examine any page viewed and show you errors or warnings about that page's HTML. Extremely useful when developing.
Incidently if you're not viewing this with Firefox, may we suggest you try it. If you're using Internet Explorer, could we insist!