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It's a very interesting perspective which you bring to this. The comments on scalability and availability are very apt, and nice to hear in the face of the marketing deluge from the app server companies.However, there are a few points where I see things differently. I've been using Art Technology Group's Dynamo, and I've been quite happy with it. As with Kiva, it is somewhat complicated to do just about anything. I have found however, that it makes the hard things significantly more achievable.
One of my main experiences of the dynamic sites I wrote before using Dynamo (in Perl or in PHP), was that I was often solving the same problems over and over. And, just as often, under time pressure, I was solving them badly. Maintaining a user's session, templating (and sub-templating) pieces of HTML, pooling database connections, inserting queues for performance, logging errors and events accurately, etc. With Dynamo, all of these things are supported in...