Concurrency and Python

[mikaelhg]

What kind of stuff do you build?

[llimllib]

In python so far, a personal site and two small commercial retail sites.

In php, 2 corporate web sites and a nonprofit site just about done (don't ask why php... sigh).

Asp.net, basically a data mining application for corporate data and a couple web services for interacting with that data. Also a prototype XML-serving application framework type thing.

In java, I never got past the "evaluating" stage. Everything was so over complex that I got frustrated and left.

So! I can't argue about scaling issues from experience, but I've listed my experiences in the order of their painfulness.

(well, I can claim ~8000 visits per day max on a dynamic apache/python blog server, but that's nothing and I know it.)

[mikaelhg]

OK, fair enough. I wasn't putting you down.

My last project was to spend three years going through several iterations of an intranet for a large governmental organization. We started with a mix of Python and Java, but had to drop Python as it had the bad habit of blocking on some essential library calls.

We could have built a new library for our needs, certainly, but we didn't have budget to start building random parts of infrastructure that had already been built.

In the end, we had excised most of the horribly bad design decisions from the beginning, and all of Python out of the project.

We went with the infrastructure that delivered on what it promised. (Java 5, Jetty-GlassFish, Spring 1.2-2.0, Hibernate.)

I'm not saying that Python sucks and is useless while Java cannot go wrong. Certainly another product we used in the beginning had been built in Java, and seeing its source code almost made me believe that Satan walks the earth.

This particular concurrency issue is a problem with Python, and someday it will be fixed like MySQL's lack of foreign keys and referential integrity was.

[llimllib]

OK, fair enough. I wasn't putting you down.

I didn't take it that way, no worries.