I've been tasked to create and maintain a web browser based interface to replace several of the manual tasks that we perform now.

I currently have a "shakey" but working program written in Perl (2779 lines) that uses basic Expect coding, but it has some limitations that require a great deal of coding to get around. Because of this I am going to do a complete rewrite and want to do it "right" this time.

My question is this... What would be the best language to use to create a web based interface to perform SSH/Telnet tasks that we would normally do manually? Keep in mind the following requirements:

• Runs on a CentOS Linux system v5.10
• Http will be served by Apache2
• This is an INTRANET site and only accessible within our organization.
• User load will be light. No more that 5 users accessing it at one time.
• perl 5.8.8, php 5.3.3, python 2.7.2 are available... Not sure what other languages to check for, or what modules might be installed in each language.
• The web interface will need to provide progress indicators and text output produced by the remote connection, in real time as it is generated.
• If we are running our process on multiple hosts, they should be in individual threads so that they can run side by side, not sequentially.
• I want the ability to "trap" on specific text generated by the remote host and display an alert to the user - such as when the remote host generates an error message.
• I would like to avoid as much client side scripting (javascript/vbscript) as I can.
• Most users will be on Windows PC's using Chrome or IE as a browser.
• Users will be downloading the resulting output so they can process it as they see fit.
• I currently have no experience with "Ajax" or the like.
• Most of my coding experience is old 6809 assembly, Visual Basic 6, and whatever I can cut/paste from online examples in various languages (hence my "shaky" Perl program)
• My coding environment is Eclipse for remote code editing, but I prefer stuff like UltraEdit if I can get a decent syntax file for the language I'm using.
• I do have su access on the server, but I'm not the only one using this server so I can't just upgrade/install blindly as I might impact other software currently running on the machine.

One reason that I'm asking here, instead of searching (which I did) is that most replies were, "use language 'xyz', but you need to use an external SSH connection" - like I'm using Expect in my Perl script. Most also did not agree on what language that 'xyz' should be.

...so, after this long posting, can someone offer some advice?