I have a big dataset (100Mbs/day) and a bunch of console a TCL/TK tools to view it – I want to turn it into a web app that I can build, and others can maintain.

In long:

my group runs simulations yielding 100s of Mbs of data daily, in multiple (mostly but not only) text forms.

We have a bunch of scripts and tools, mostly old school 1990’s style stuff requiring a 5-button mouse, as well as lots of ad-hoc scripts that engineers build out of frustration every month or so. These produces UIs, graphs, spreadsheets (various sizes), logs, event histories etc.

I want to replace (or at least supplement) the xwindows / console style UI with a web-based one, so I need the following properties:

• pleasant to program
• can wrap existing command-line tools in separate views (I don’t need to scrape GUIs or anything)
• as I port logic from the existing scripts I can create a modularised and pleasant codebase to replace it
• I can attach a web-ui to navigate between views – each view is likely to contain keys which might make sense to view in another

I am new to building systems that have logic on the back-end and front-end of a web-server. from that point of view, they do this:

• backend wraps old-school executables, constructs calls into them and them takes the output and wraps it up, niceifies it and delivers it to the web client. For instance the tool might generate a number of indexed images (per invocation) which I might deliver all at once or on-demand. May (probably) need to to heavy stats on some sources.
• frontend provides navigation connecting multiple views, performs requests from one view for data from another (or self to self), etc. Probably will have some views with a lot of interactivity.

Can people please point me towards viable solutions for this? I know it’s a bit of an open question so as answers come in I hope to refine the spec until we have a good match.

I guess I expect to see answers like “RoR!” “beans!” “Scala!” but please give an indication of why those are a good fit; I know nothing! I’m not asking for _which is best, Scala or RoR*, but rather which have been a good fit for people doing what I’m trying to do?

I got bumped off SO for asking an open-ended question, so sorry if its OT here too (let me know). I take the policy that I use the best/closest matched language for a project but most of my team are extremely low level (ie pipeline stages and CDyn) so I don’t have the peer group to know where to start.