Python 3.0, 'Python 3000', has reached its first public release. This version will be followed by beta releases throughout 2008, and the final release is scheduled for August 2008. "Python 3000 ('Py3k', and released as Python 3.0) is a new version of the language that is incompatible with the 2.x line of releases. The language is mostly the same, but many details, especially how built-in objects like dictionaries and strings work, have changed considerably, and a lot of deprecated features have finally been removed."
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Member since:2005-07-24
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For web applications, I would probably prefer Java in most cases for performance reasons.
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Because, as we all know, hardware is expensive. And programmers are cheap.
Check out Django:
http://www.djangoproject.org
If it can handle the Washington Post's site, it can probably handle your sites. It scales out like you wouldn't believe. And with memcached, you have caching at multiple levels, at as fine or as coarse a granularity as you desire.
And the "Curse Gaming" site has shown that it can handle 600,000 pages per hour. (That's pages, not hits.)
Edited 2007-09-01 17:59
Member since:2005-07-06
As you say, people (not just programmers) are expensive, hardware is cheap.
I have checked out Django, and IMHO the usability for the content providers leaves a lot to wish for. If you want to go the python way, Plone http://www.plone.org is probably a much better choice as it will require less training for the end users, and it have a large flora of plugins so chances are that you don't have to do much programming, other than tweaking the templates to your liking.
It is also built as a client server applications where you can have many frontends connecting to one database backend making it scale almost infinitely.
The fact that it comes in a bundle with Python/Zope/Plone makes it very easy to get started with as you don't need to install and maintain a separate database. (even though you can if you want).
The fact that it is built on an application server saves a lot of lines of code in case you need to do something more advanced in the backround such as banking or shopping cart applications.
The Templates in Plone is written in TAL (Template Attribut Language) where every template is a full html page with no special html tags. This means that the easily can be handled well by standard html tools. It is also possible to add mockup data in the templates during the design process that then left out when applied to the server.
On the other hand, doing it in java isn't exactly rocket science these days either, and that will go easier on your system resources. With modern tools like Netbeans or Oracle JDeveloper, making web GUI for your applications is very much a point and click thing, and writing the actual application logic probably carry about the same difficulties regardless of what programming language or application server you use.
I suppose that in the end, your choice will depend on what background you have e.g. what languages you know and what performance you need, and the amount of application logic you need before you push out your web pages to your users.
Member since:
2005-07-06
For web applications, I would probably prefer Java in most cases for performance reasons. On the other hand, sometimes there are more than speed to consider. With tools like Plone and Zope very advanced web functionality can be created without even touching the Python that supplies the functionality in the background.
Python is still a very nice language though. I'm not saying that big companies won't use python. What I'm saying is that they wont use python 3.0 They will stay with the 2.x branch for as long as possible, making much of the new nice stuff sort of wasted..
Just compare the Python situation with that of Java. In the java case, 10 years old, or older java classes runs well on the latest java 6. But even so most people still use jdk1.4, people are afraid to upgrade even though java 6 is a completely different animal with respect to speed and ease of development than jdk1.4, so in reality there is very little reason not to upgrade. Still they don't. So, What do you think will happen to python where backward compatibility is broken deliberately.
IMHO, having just one branch, where you try to be backward compatible for say at least 10 years but evolve without breaking old things is a better way to introduce new things. That way more daring developers have a better chance to influence old conservative ones with a "if it worked for grand dad it works for me" attitude.