I am interested in making an in house web ui to ease some of the management tasks I face with administrating many servers; think Canonical's Landscape. This means doing things like, applying package updates simultaneously across servers, perhaps installing a custom .deb (I use ubuntu/debian.) Reviewing server logs, executing custom scripts, viewing status information for all my servers. I hope to be able to reuse existing command line tools instead of rewriting the exact same operations in a different language myself.

I really want to develop something that allows me to continue managing on the ssh level but offers the power of a web interface for easily applying the same infrastructure wide changes. They should not be mutually exclusive.

What are some recommended programming languages to use for doing this kind of development and tying it into a web ui? Why do you recommend the language(s) you do?

I am not an experienced programmer, but view this as an opportunity to scratch some of my own itches as well as become a better programmer. I do not care specifically if one language is harder than another, but am more interested in picking the best tools for the job from the beginning.

Feel free to recommend any existing projects except Landscape (not free,) Ebox (not entirely free, and more than I am looking for,) and webmin (I don't like it, feels clunky and does not integrate well with the "debian way" of maintaining a server, imo.)

Thanks for any ideas!