[ale] need your input on a project...

[Joseph A Knapka]

John Wells wrote:
> Guys,
> 
> Just landed a rather large project involving converting a VB/Access/Sql
> Server app to an open source app.
> 
> I'm most likely going the web approach because it makes very good sense in
> this case.
> 
> However, this is where I'm a bit indecisive.  I've used PHP quite a bit in
> the past, and while it's very nice for smaller projects, I think it tends
> to get messy as the project grows.  This particular app will have over 70
> screens and a lot of background processing, so I'm not convinced PHP is
> the way to go.  I also want to go OO, and although PHP has limited OO
> capabilities, it begins to feel a little Perl-y after a while
> (<flamebait>granted, PHP's OO syntax is much cleaner than
> Perl's</flamebait>).
> 
> My next thought was: Gee...wish Python web programming was really *There*.
>  I looked at web programming in python briefly in the past, and it seems
> as if there was either A. cgi scripting,  or B. a number of server
> pages-like projects, but cgi is not the way I'd like to go for
> efficiency's sake, and the server page projects looked to be a little
> beta-ish and not what I need for a project of this magnitude.  Then
> there's Zope, which seems mature, but folks have mentioned problems with
> threading and the like.

If you're going to run it on a single-CPU machine, threading will
work just exactly as well as it would with any other solution.
If you're going to run on an SMP box, and you want to use
Python, consider Jython, which uses Java's threads and thus
doesn't suffer from the problems that CPython does on SMP
hardware.

Zope has a *very* steep learning curve, but you can do lots
of useful stuff with it even when you're still on the shallow
end. For one thing, it makes persistent CGI in Python a
breeze - no waiting for CGI handlers to start up, which
in a lot of cases is all you need, and the more
"advanced" (or "impenetrable") aspects of Zope need not
concern you.

Nonetheless, if you're really interested in using Python
for this job, consider a simpler app server such as Cherrypy
<http://cherrypy.org>, which is totally simple to grok and
100% Python. There's a small boatload of simple Python
app servers available; seems like everyone's writing one
these days.

> So, finally, my last option is Java/Jsp/Servlets.  I have a lot of
> experience in this area,


Sorry. Ugh. I'm writing more Java code now for my "real" job,
and I like it less and less all the time.

-- Joe


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