> I just figure, everything is coming in as a string no matter what. It's going back out as a string.

And everything in memory is a sequence of bytes. I don't see the relevance of this line of reasoning. I guarantee that whatever experience you've had with statically typed languages on the web, it's not a good language. Interfacing with dynamic systems is simply a matter of good abstractions, which many languages simply lack.

Take a look at F#'s type providers to see where you can go with this.