I'd like to experiment with a new language/framework to work on some desktop tools for myself, which will do tasks related to internet services.

I.e. i'd like to to monitor some of my servers for http or icmp response, also parse xml responses.

I have experience with php, lua, mysql, and basic knowledge of java and c++.

I'm also interested in exploring multithreading for this, background tasks and a responsive gui do need that as i have read.

Being a private project, i certainly want to learn something new, but i don't have that much free time. The question for you would be which language and what framework to choose that could help me with this tasks:

• lightweight + fast gui (windows only would be ok, platform-independent even better)
• network/socket support, html module would be appreciated
• htmlview support
• xml "parsing" support (xpath or something like the phpish DOMDocument class)
• threading support

Free software would be nice, but paying some bucks won't hurt me if it really helps the case.