I'd use a continuation based framework to get started. Seaside for smalltalk, plt-scheme or UCW in lisp. I've been using UCW to develop my project. It makes it really easy to think about the problem. You serve a page, the page has actions (method calls) which take parameters. The parameters are fields on the page. It's really easy to think about an application. It lets you prototype in code.

For our stuff, I started with rails, just found it too hard to get started. I had to decide what the tables looked like, how I was going to divide the data, write a model for every table then connect it to a page.

With UCW, I write code which connects to a function call. Simple.