Google App Engine Heroku

PhantomJS CasperJS

PhantomJS is a headless browser. It's used to test your applications in background, without launching a browser. Unlike Selenium, which launches the browser and then clicks buttons manually, a headless browser does everything in the background. This is possible because all that the test framework cares about is the HTML content and not the actual UI.

Scala is cleaner and more expressive than Java. Scala's concurrency is less complex. Scala is even more Object Oriented than Java. Scala is more functional than Java8. Scala is what Java could have been.

Play with Scala

Futures/Promises are the way to go.

For beginners I don't suggest JavaScript (or Haskell) because it's too loosely typed. Python/Ruby fall somewhere in between, they are neither too strict nor too lax. Kind of like the Goldilocks's zone for beginners.

True that. Python or Ruby are good starting points. There's CodeAcademy, Khan Academy's CS class, Coursera, Udacity, Edx etc..You have the whole internet wanting to teach you for free.

Mine was when I joined a company that used Scala. It was a whole new world to me.

if you are just starting programming, then I would advise you against functional programming. If not, go Scala. It's a perfect practical language. But, if you are in search of purity, go Idris or Haskell.