This depends entirely on what you are making. If it is heavily datadriven and you are only prototyping an ORM will help you immensely especially if it creates your database structures for you, for this I reccomend Django (Python). If you are not beholden to a heavily datadriven system you can go with Flask (Python). If you however do not even need a backend to talk to, lets say you do not need data consistency or storage at all, you can get away with an entirely client side javascript solution and later plug in a backend. JQuery is awesome, I use it every day and it makes life a lot easier.