Language Choice for Multi-Tier/Multi-Threaded/Event-Based Container

I would like to start a new project that consists of multiple tie开发者_C百科rs, the web tier, event-driven business logic, data processing, etc. I had worked on PHP and Java-based projects for the past few years and speaking from experience, Java (and given the open source libraries to achieve scheduling, ORM, AOP, etc.) is usually a good choice - and of course, you DON'T ALWAYS need a container as different tiers and services can be written with different languages, integrated, together with other processes such as cron jobs.

Now, given that I am starting a new project, I am wondering how would others advice me on the language choice. I am trying to find some answers from Python, Ruby, Erlang Google searches, but certainly this is a good place to collect some good advices and criticisms.

Thoughts?

What I use regularly is the omnipresent LAMP stack (Linux, Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP server logic) and if I need to do something more intensive on the backend, such as processing lots of language data, or running network commands and sorting the output before feeding it back into the system, I use Perl. All of these utilities/languages are available in almost every distribution's repositories, as well as the connector code to use them all together (php5-mysql, for instance, to import PHP functions that allow you to use MySQL).

UPDATE: I would like to add a few ideas to this answer, since someone upvoted it and called my attention to it today. When I wrote this, I was experimenting with a few different technologies, and in many ways I still stand by what I said earlier. LAMP is vastly more mature than any other web platform out there. It's still true that you just can't go wrong starting with this combination.

That being said, a year later, I have been using Nginx and Python (through uWSGI) quite a lot for my personal projects. I think now distro support for both of these technologies is mature enough that people with significant site traffic should genuinely consider switching out Apache with Nginx. It serves static resources FAR faster than Apache. If you want to use PHP, you will probably be using php-fpm to connect PHP to Nginx. If you want to use Python -- which is fast becoming one of my favorite languages, both for its performance and its language features that have grown on me -- you will have a huge choice of options to choose from in order to connect Nginx to Python, but I highly recommend uWSGI for the simple fact that it's tested and it's very fast. As for databasing, I still think MySQL is broadly-powerful enough to suit many different situations. If you disagree with this statement, I'm sure you are experienced enough to search for many thorough resources showing pros and cons for almost any situation.