I'm a longtime dba with some decent programming experience. Mostly DBA related (PL/SQL,shell scripts,etc..)
I have a need to create a simple web application utilizing responsive,single-page application (like AJAX). I'm looking for a recommendation on technologies that are simple and straight forward and would allow me to spin up a web application quickly. I have minimal JAVA and Python skills but quick learner. (about 20 years dba/development experience). From what I know I was thinking DJANGO, Ruby on Rails, etc.. On the Client side JQuery, AJAX, maybe Angular??
I'd like it to be all open source and run on something like Tomcat on Linux. My design will be a "flat" type interface with simple icons. I will be interfacing with a backend Rest API.
Any thoughts/tips would be appreciated.
As far as the programming language goes, it's very opinion based. Rails or Django are both good choices, and you might want to take a look at node.js as well. They're all similarly structured MVC, share a lot of concepts, run on Linux, and all open source. You could do a tutorial or 2 and see if one of them sticks with you, but you won't go wrong with any of these 3.
JQuery is a very good choice for the front-end javascript library, and it actually contains AJAX inside of its JQuery functions.
Also, I don't know what you're doing for hosting, but I have used a few different hosts and my favorite has been Heroku. A quick and simple way to get a django/python app running is pythonanywhere. But again, it's pretty opinion based, so I thought I'd throw out some ideas for you. Welcome to web development!