[erlang-questions] newbie web-development advice / guidance

[Icarus Alive]

Hi,

Looking for some suggestions on how to get started with Web
development in Erlang.
My background is largely C/C++ systems development, and picked up some Erlang,
i.e. I can understand most not-too-complex/large Erlang programs given
a little time,
unless very esoteric style is adopted, and still find it a bit hard to
'think in Erlang'
(a decade of procedural and OO thinking often gets in the way). However, with a
turn of events, now I need to do some web-development.

Started looking at Nitrogen, but finding the syntax very hard. A steep
learning curve.
I've done some PHP programming a decade back, and found it to be very simple,
and this seems almost like a herculean learning exercise. The
tutorial, didn't seem
to be structured in a beginner friendly way, and there is hardly any
alternative tutorial
available. So I wonder as to how many people are really using it. I've
had a look at
Zotonic as well, but not sure if that might be easier / simpler, and
also if it'd be
too-much work separating out the CMS from the framework, it might be
bit too hard
for a beginner to make reasonable progress.

My preferred approach would be to keep the backend pretty much REST'ish and use
heavier frontend (s.a. jQuery) to interact with it, although I've the
need for delivering
some streaming media, and strong authentication etc. Also, I shall the
services to be
available on mobile handsets.

Would really appreciate if someone can share thoughts, advice, and pointer to
good / comprehensive tutorials etc., to make this learning (&
adoption) as simple and
easy as possible. Alternatively if someone feels that sticking to PHP
(which I am slightly
more comfortable with) would be a good idea, shall be happy to have that vote
of confidence.

Icarus