If you are into Perl you might try mod_perl/Apache. There are
Perl/HTML integrator tools like Embperl or Mason. Perl is way more
flexible than C and a lot more expressive than PHP. It's also quite
fast. With mod_perl you don't spawn an extra Perl process for every
apache request because the perl interpreter is loaded into apache
(likewise mod_php/Apache). I would say mod_perl/Apache is the swiss
army knife of application servers.
You find more at http://perl.apache.org
Dirk