Newbie needs to see a large project

[Cameron Laird]

In article <3F82F132.9080203 at nohowe.net>,
Nowan  <nowan.noware at nohowe.net> wrote:
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>I'm in the same situation.  I'm an enterprise database guy who is 
>looking at building database-backed transactional web apps.  Stuff that 
>might otherwise be done using ASP or JSP/Servlets.
>
>I need a database-driven web app that might support a few hundred users.
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> From the many thoughtful responses, I'm afraid that a lot of folks 
>haven't built large apps, and haven't built sophisticated database apps.
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>10,000 LOC is not even a medium size app.
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>In a database-backed web site, the database is definitely not the 
>bottleneck if you are using Oracle or another enterprise class product. 
>    Unless your database design is very complex, it is the 
>performance/design of your web/middleware.
>
>I'm building my little demo app.  I'm loving Python.  Python rocks.  Way 
>cooler than Perl.  Way cooler than PHP.  But the question looms ahead... 
>When I get finished, will it be fast enough to be a practical 
>alternative to ASP or JSP/Servlets?
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I was with you until the last question.  My experience
is that JSP and even ASP provide only weak competition
for Pythonic Web frameworks, in terms of performance.
JSP in particular ... well, I'll just say that JSP isn't
*my* standard for performance.

I get your point that transactional systems can be very
serious and large, and require care.  I do NOT agree
that middleware is always the bottleneck.  I know of
several mission-critical systems throttled by raw data
retrieval.  One in particular, a point-of-sale server,
is Oracle-backed.  Maybe you have in mind some implicit
point about database retrieval being manageable in that
the system could, in principle, acquire bigger and
faster data-store hardware.  I have complete confidence
that all the decision-makers on the projects I have in
mind would answer uniformly:  "no way".  Along with
other headaches, no one wants to go through Oracle
relicensing.
-- 

Cameron Laird <claird at phaseit.net>
Business:  http://www.Phaseit.net