Porting Java web application to Python to make it faster?

[Wolfgang Keller]

Hello,

as a non-developer I am currently participating in an industrial "research"
project to develop a so-called "web application". This application serves
at the same time as middleware to connect several other "conventional"
enterprise-applications such as ERP, SCADA etc. and to provide a GUI
frontend to the users. The developers are into Struts, Enterprise Java
Beans and the like, so it will be entirely implemented in Java with all the
processing on the server side and only static HTML pages on the client
side. It will have to "emulate" much of the GUI logic of a conventional
interactive application with multiple Eclipse-like collapsable panes,
XForms-like dynamic forms, lots of expandable tree views and sortable lists
everywhere, plus SOAP communication "behind the scenes" to get and put
loads of data all over the company's network.

The developers say it will require "considerable" hardware resources in
order to allow reasonable response times, according to them >>1GByte of RAM
for a rather small workgroup (<10 concurrent users). From my own personal
experience with applications implemented in Java (such as UML and database
modeling tools etc.) I fear that this might in fact mean that the reponse
times will be Godot-like and that the application will miserably choke as
soon as we confront it with real-world amounts of data going beyond the
usual "three items" toy demonstrations.

Now the question: If this desaster scenario (I'm working for the industrial
application partner in the project who expects to get some results that
will be actually usable for everydays' work) will actually happen (I hope
it won't, but still...), might there be a chance that by paying a cs
student for porting it to Python in his diploma thesis using such things as
Coil, Cheetah, Webware etc. it will get slimmer and faster? And if so, by
how much approximately? 10%? One order of magnitude?

TIA,

Best regards,

Wolfgang Keller