Ask HN: Python, php or ruby for personal project?

Hi,

I've mostly been a perl and java guy to date, and am looking to expand my horizons with one of php, ruby or python. To that end I've settled on a simple personal week(end) web app project which should give me a little intro. My requirements are:

- Don't really need a web app framework. This is (more-or-less) a single page app. A script that can be called by apache/httpd is enough.

- Need decent url parsing & encoding/decoding

- Networking, specifically http

- DOM rendering, a la dom4j, so i can traverse and alter/add/delete nodes and node attributes.

Whether intrinsically or via libs, is there anything to recommend one language above the other?

Thanks for suggestions.