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The time has come when I need to bite the bullet and learn how to do some web development. It's really not my cup of tea. However, I have an idea for an application that needs to have a GUI in a web browser.

There is nothing revolutionary about this. It's pretty simple. There will be some sort of database back end (I'll have to learn that too) and I will write some code to implement the business logic which will run on the server and speak to the database. It will speak to a web server on the other side and there will be a client which will exist in a web page for drawing the pictures, including the buttons and the text boxes to type things in.

The last time I went near any evil web stuff was over a decade ago. We were using Fitnesse to run a bunch of Ruby scripts on a server somewhere. I seem to remember there was a web server (written in Java) that came with it. I quite liked Ruby, but haven't touched it since.

Due to the fact that I am a bit lysdexic (I think) I find programming in dynamic languages very difficult. I also appreciate the extra layers of compile-time checks a compiler gives you. I realise this is not the way web development works, which is why I have avoided it. I prefer to write my code using TDD so I always write a failing unit test case before implementing code to make it pass, rinse and repeat.

So what I want is something simple and powerful to do the browser front end which runs in as many browsers as possible, and will not drive me mad or give me migraines when I'm trying to learn how to do it.

Suggestions please!