If you do it yourself, does it count as a framework?

Server: python, postgresql, cherrypy, simplejson

Client: Javascript, HTML, CSS, Dojo, AJAX.

All the HTML is loaded up front and then AJAX for all the rest. Dojo insulates me from browser quirks. TDD Python is what I use at work (and love) and is good for complex algorithms (language morphology, in arabic).

I don't use an all-encompassing framework because I need total UTF-8 support and I feel more comfortable with the general tailorability of the lower-level libraries over the likes of Django, Rails.