[carucez]

I use PHP as my scripting language. A lot of my server-side processing is done in PHP, including sockets and statistical analysis. I know it best, and am most effective with it.

Python is a bit more robust for all things higher-level, and I would recommend that before PHP any day (for someone starting out in).

Client side stuff is (for me) all JavaScript, always, using the JQuery library to ease my web pain.

HOWTO do divide Client from Server? Separate machines and insist that all back-end processing and storage goes on one set, and all client-side functionality goes on the other. Loading/parsing of archived data is a client-side process, as far as I'm concerned. Use standard protocols and formats to talk between the machines.

[pavel_lishin]

Ditto, except for me the breakdown is PHP for work, Python for personal projects.