High performance Python on NT

[R Wentworth]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> Run, don't walk, to http://www.zope.org.  You'll think you've died and gone to
> heaven.

I looked at Zope a little while ago, and it did seem rather exciting.
Depends a little bit on your constraints, though, whether it's the
right solution.  I had a project that needed to be hosted via a commercial
hosting provider, and nobody was willing to run Zope unless I rented
a dedicated server.  (Actually, not really nobody, but with web hosting
providers it can be devastatingly bad to become dependent on a single
hosting service unless you've got a lot of prior positive experience
with them.)

I chose instead to go with a solution using the Java "servlet" interface
(instead of CGI), and writing JPython (http://www.jpython.org/) servlets 
instead of Java servlets.  Don't know if this could be considered a
"high-performance" solution; it avoids the process creation and
DB connection overhead of CGI solutions, but JPython is inherently
slower than Python.  So, depends what sort of performance matters.
I expect JPython to be fine as long as I'm not too compute-intensive;
we'll see.  In this model, if I run into performance bottlenecks
I can improve things by selectively rewriting code into Java.

(I did have a few other concerns about Zope: I wanted to do some
non-hierarchical design, and found that the limited documentation
made attempting such a thing difficult.  Still, I hope to have
an excuse to learn/use Zope someday in the future.)

Robert Wentworth