Ask HN: Last moment Christmas gift App help

As I have not bought a Christmas gift for my brother yet and he doesn't seem want anything special I going to try to make a (web) App to amuse him.

It's a Machine Learning 'Art' project thought up in a hurry.

I need some quick recommendations for libraries and frameworks to make this work in the short time available.

For the ML code Im going to use octave as that is my experience with ML.

Now I want the ML code to output a file for the client side to view, more concretely its going to be either a 2D (or possibly a 3D) like model that's is going to be rendered in 3D to the user.

First I thought about doing the client side in Java(or Scala), but Its seems I could do it directly in the browser using WebGL, although I haven't used it at all (I have used OpenGl in java) and my JavaScript experience is much less than my Java one.

Anyhow I also need some server code to glue together the client code to the ML code and to serve the website, here my experience is almost none, I have some basic PHP experience, but I have never done anything that interfaces with a program on the server, so I don't really know what software I need.

Basically all I need is to call a octave script with arguments based on client side (browser) interaction and then get the resulting 3D model or image into my WebGL code for the user to view.

My biggest knowledge gap is the server side software.

Do I need a framework like Play! or Ruby on Rails or are they overkill, I have zero experience using them. Like I said I only have little experience with writing PHP with a db, I haven't actually interfaced a program with server code before so I want the solution with smallest and simples learning curve.

So are my assumptions that WebGL is the way forward correct (I only need to render textured surfaces)

And what software stack is needed to interface my ML code to client code.

I know Java, Scala, Octave, Javascript, Python, PHP (in order of experience)