Simple and effective web framework

Question

I'm looking for a suitable cross-platform web framework (if that's the proper term). I need something that doesn't rely on knowing the server's address or the absolute path to the files. Ideally it would come with a (development) server and be widely supported.

I've already tried PHP, Django and web2py. Django had an admin panel, required too much information (like server's address or ip) and felt unpleasant to work with; PHP had chown and chmod conflicts with the server (the code couldn't access uploaded files or vice versa) and couldn't handle urls properly; web2py crashed upon compiling and the manual didn't cover that -- not to mention it required using the admin panel. Python is probably the way to go, but even the amount of different web frameworks and distributions for Python is too much for me to install and test individually.

What I need is a simple and effective cross-platform web development language that works pretty much anywhere. No useless admin panels, no fancy user interfaces, no databases (necessarily), no restrictions like users/access/levels and certainly no "Web 2.0" crap (for I hate that retronym). Just an all-powerful file and request parser.

I'm used to programming in C and other low level languages, so difficulty is not a problem.

Answer 1

This question is based on a complete failure to understand any of the tools you have apparently "investigated", or indeed web serving generally.

Django has an admin panel? Well, don't use it if you don't want to. There's no configuration that needs to be done there, it's for managing your data if you want.

PHP has chown problems? PHP is a language, not a framework. If you try and run something with it, you'll need to set permissions appropriately. This would be the case whatever language you use.

You want something that doesn't need to know its address or where its files are? What does that even mean? If you are setting up a webserver, it needs to know what address to respond to. Then it needs to know what code to run in response to a request. Without configuring somewhere the address and the path to the files, nothing can ever happen.