Starting a SaaS business. Which technology should I use?

[Finne]

I'm playing with the idea of starting a business to create a Customer Relationship Management tool similar to www.Salesforce.com and www.Highrisehq.com.

I learned that Salesforce was developed with 'Apex' and Highrise with 'Ruby on Rails'.

Can anybody with experience please explain to me which programming languages would be suitable for this type of application, and what are the pros and cons for each?

[is_numeric]

it depends on a number of things. RoR is very good apparently but you still have a massive learning curve to contend with.

You have a lot of choice and all will pretty much deliver. Depends on what knowledge you have already and what market you are aiming at. Corporate / Enterprise for example would lean toward the JAVA, .NET technologies where the open source world would look at PHP. It depends on a lot of questions through analysis and requirements gathering.