In terms of the ability to deploy, does any web programming language stand out or lag behind the others?

Question

In terms of the number of servers ready to receive an application written in the language, the number of people who can write code using the language, and so on?

Answer 1

Not so much the LANGUAGE, but the technology platform. IMO Sharepoint web apps still have a long way to go in terms of the administrative action needed to deploy them, versus a straight ASP.NET application, which can be easily installed using a WiX script (or even XCOPY deployment in simple situations...)

Answer 2

Now don't laugh, but I'd say PHP/MySQL stands out as its free and really easy to get running on a local windows or linux machine. Most shared hosting providers have these available in a reasonably configurable state.

If you need something that works, isn't too hard to begin with and costs nothing, you can't go wrong.

Use it with Zend Framework for all kinds of OOP goodness.

Answer 3

With java it is pretty simple to deploy webapps. You just package your application in a war file (web archive) and provide that war file to the appserver (tomcat, jboss, weblogic , ...) that will unpack the war and deploy it automatically.

Their are also a lot of coders who can write java so that will definitly not be a problem. There are also a ton of web frameworks for the java language, both MVC based (Spring MVC is probably the best known here) and component based (JSF implementations).

Another webapp platform rapidly on the rise is Seam, which provides nice integration of the complete JBOSS stack (JBoss appserver, Hibernate, richfaces, ...)