Dynamic Non-blogging site

(PS: After submitting I realized, I may not have posted it under the right section! Admins please move it if you think so).

Hi All,

I consider myself pretty new to WordPress, as I haven’t used it in the last few years. I am building a dynamic web application and I am wondering if I should/could use wordpress for that.

The requirements are:
– Database Interactions: I have scientific data warehouse, and the users of my application need to query or view data from this database in different formats (data grid with pagination, or just in a table, on free text.

– REST Service interactions: I have RESTful Web service that delivers the data from the database as various Resources. I addition to direct database querying, I also want to get data from this REST service (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE).

– JavaScript/Ajax Frameworks: I want to use JQuery or ExtJS (Sencha) frameworks to dynamically get the data from the REST interface and display the data.

– Visualization: Some of the data needs visualization, such as Graphs, Networks, etc. I want to use Flash/Javascript based plugins (that I already have) for these.

– User Management and Access control: I need to manage registered users and control access to some pages/data to certain users.

Basically, I am looking for a non-static, non-blogging, mostly dynamic website, where I don’t have to do a lot of CSS or HTML editing stuff.

I can do all this with my own html/php/JS/css files, but somehow, I am unable to get the professional look that some sites have, and might implement features that probably are already implemented as plugins, etc..

I would great appreciate if you guys here think:
– WordPress could be used and is a good solution?
– I read some good reaviews about 3.1+ release of WP as a CMS. Will it help for my requirements?
– What is the best approach if any of you guys have worked on something similar?
– Any other recommendations on tools and frameworks.
– WordPress vs Joomla?

Thanks, DSD

[moved to ‘miscellaneous’]