A Drowsy Numbness Pains My Sense

Here's the good news:

Hemlock is a new web development framework, focused on allowing easy development of real-time, many-to-many apps. Hemlock follows the inspiration of Ruby web frameworks like Rails and Merb. It can be used for applications such as games, workspace collaboration and education.

Open source, too. What's not to like? How about this?

By combining the scalability of XMPP with the flexibility of Flash, Hemlock allows you to create web applications that are more dynamic, interactive and exciting.

Flash??? Aaaargh - quick: pass the hemlock.