To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
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:
2005-07-24
"""
For web applications, I would probably prefer Java in most cases for performance reasons.
"""
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