Lua

So lua appears to be a rocking good choice for NODOWS. Its tiny, fast, and has a lot of cool packages and libraries available for it, so the choice is an easy one. There will be a couple of different setups - flat XML storage for data, cdb for big key value pair databases, and mysql/sqlite/postgres for more complex data. Since NODOWS is meant for low-power devices, its likely that only sqlite will be supported locally. MySQL and Postgres would be hosted elsewhere and accessed via TCP.

NGINX is also turning out to be a really terrific solution for NODOWS. The xslt module is amazing, and paired with lua via FastCGI, its a great combination.