I think I understand the question.
So for building website or web application. Your flavors of choice are:
Java,
C# ,
VB.NET,
ColdFusion,
Perl,
PHP,
Python ,
Ruby and,
Lua .
Packages:
LAMP/
WAMP/
MAMP(Linux/Window/Mac, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl)
Most people who use this set choose PHP.
Ajax)(Asynchronous, JavaScript, XML)
ASP.Net(Active Server Pages)
*Sorry if any links are broken or in the wrong spot.
I would Suggest you also check out the follow information.
Web 2.0
Zend This has to do with PHP.
Yahoo Developer Network
Google Web Toolkit
I usually use PHP+MYSQL with a CSS layout.
If you wanted you could use all of the above most of them will talk to each other.