Decisions, Decisions

As application developers, we come upon far too many decisions within the development of even a simple application. Developers need to make decisions about which type of business logic to use and it what cases to use it. Developers also need to make decisions about how to lay out a user interface and which components will work best for a particular situation.

I've been finding myself in a major decision state when it comes to application development...a decision which must be made prior to making any decisions at all about how the business logic will flow, or how the UI will be constructed. Which language will best suit my needs? As developers, many of us know how to construct applications in more than one language...but which one will do the job best? One of my most difficult decisions is based upon this very question.

For example, last week I was asked to develop a simple layout which will display statistical results for a number of different job crafts. I basically needed to display some data within several different HTML tables. Now, I can easily create this page using a variety of languages: HTML, PL/SQL, JSP, JSF, Python...just to name a few. Which will work best?

I am an advocate of PL/SQL since it is stored within the database, and the speed is unmatched. However, the development time with PL/SQL in such a case may be a bit more lengthy than some other solutions. I also love JSF because of it's clear separation between the view and the business logic, but it may perform a bit slower than PL/SQL. However, my development time with JSF would probably be much shorter than PL/SQL because I can use JDevelopers WYSIWYG JSF solution.

What do you choose in such a situation?