I'm trying to craft a site for web-based (original) board games, and my client (currently written in Actionscript, but that's highly fungible) works fine - I can play solitaire games in the client - but it has nothing to connect to.

What I'm looking for is a server framework for handling accounts/authentication and game tracking: something that would let players log in, show them a list of their current games, let them invite friends to new games, let them make moves in the games they have open, etc. I'm flexible on language; obviously I'm going to have to write a lot of server code to handle the actual game logic, but that should be straightforward enough. I'm more concerned with how to handle the user (and game) DBs, though suggestions for a good server framework for communicating with the DBs (and serving up, most likely, JSON for client communications) are also welcome. Right now my leaning is towards Ruby (probably with Rails) but as far as I can determine it would be a pretty good chunk of effort to set up the necessary databases, so having something even higher-level would be really useful to me.