jython for a large-scale web site?

[Sandy Norton]

Hi folks,

I work with a web company that has about 180,000 registered users, and
pretty good weekly traffic stats. Their current platform of
development includes Oracle for the data server, AOLServer for web
serving platform and TCL to script the whole thing together, with
everything running on Solaris on a few fat multiprocessor Sun
machines.

I just had a chat with the CTO (I've been trying to get him to look
into python for a while) and it seems his resistance has finally
broken (-: he spent a real weekend with the python and his initial
misgivings about significant whitespace have disapeared, and now he's
raving about how well the language 'flows'.

Suddenly, this recent convert wants to incorporate python into the
next generation build of the web site. Now he is leaning towards using
a combination of jython and java to reimplement and refactor the
design as he likes the support and momentum behind java and doesn't
want to give up the productivity benefits of a scripting language.

Now, I'm really happy to have turned the top tech decision-maker in
the company on to python (kinda validates my fascination with the
language internally :-) But I'm worried about things like performance
and scalability: is it wise to service this number of customers with
jython servlets running on tomcat for example?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

Sandy