There was an old ruby framework called camping. I don't think you can get any more lightweight than that. But it's probably obsolete by now.
Meteor (meteor.com) may not be that lightweight, but it's a really neat model (inherently realtime, no glue code from template to database).
MongoDB (and to some extent CouchDB) are much simpler databases to get started with than MySQL. (No need to write migrations most of the time.) You will need to learn the various ways around the "read-modify-write" race condition nightmare.
For anyone doing any kind of development, I would recommend Vagrant (vagrantup.com). On the surface, it's just a VM where you run your code. But it makes it easy/simple to document your development(/production) environment assumptions, and check them into your VCS.
There are several benefits: All developers will have the same dev environment that mirrors production. New developers (even on different OSes) don't waste any time setting up an environment.
Meteor (meteor.com) may not be that lightweight, but it's a really neat model (inherently realtime, no glue code from template to database).
MongoDB (and to some extent CouchDB) are much simpler databases to get started with than MySQL. (No need to write migrations most of the time.) You will need to learn the various ways around the "read-modify-write" race condition nightmare.
For anyone doing any kind of development, I would recommend Vagrant (vagrantup.com). On the surface, it's just a VM where you run your code. But it makes it easy/simple to document your development(/production) environment assumptions, and check them into your VCS.
There are several benefits: All developers will have the same dev environment that mirrors production. New developers (even on different OSes) don't waste any time setting up an environment.