Appcelerator is a framework that helps: abstract out widget code, pass messages from widgets to other widgets and to a server.

Good news: less code. Bad news: not much additional functionality. Looks interesting.

Zoho Creator noted here before, has a language, Deluge, that is used to build apps.

Good news: much less code! Bad news: apps look the same.

The hosted app server space is growing. Amazon EC3, Google App Engine, Zoho.

Stumbled across Yahoo BOSS Mashup Framework, a Python query-based language for web data. It seems like query languages/extensions are somewhat "hot": jQuery, SQL, the VB 9 extensions, power shell (aka Monad), and XSLT. Maybe not "hot" but more like necessary, and in development. (See Google's MapReduce paper.)

This could be a real growth area. On unix systems, some of the most popular tools are grep and find (also awk, perl, xargs... and less popularly sort, uniq, cut, paste, and join). These are commands that loop over text files and filter or manipulate them. Unix also has the pipes, which work a little like "lazy evaluation" in functional languages -- the code doesn't run until the data is available, and data is produced and consumed incrementally through the pipeline. So you can process large amounts of data, though it could be a slow process.