fairly large webapp: from Java to Python. experiences?

[John M. Gabriele]

brianhray at gmail.com wrote:
> To replace a large framework you will probably need a framework.

Well, I'm sure not all web frameworks are created equal, however,
CherryPy does bill itself as a "web framework".

> Take a
> look at http://www.djangoproject.com or http://www.turbogears.org. They
> both use some of the tools you mention but operate on a higher level.

Django looks interesting to me. Would like to try out mod_python.
Taking a look...

> I find Python fairly easy to maintain. Unfortunatly, I do not find it
> easy to take a bunch of Java code and move it to Python.

Well, I figured it might be better to use the previous webapp
as a *model* to learn from, rather than to directly translate
code from Java to Python.

> But once it is
> there, Python is a good choice for web apps. Java is slow

Slow? They're both dynamic languages, but Java is statically
typed (with less work to do at runtime). For long-running processes,
I'd guess that Java bytecode executes faster than Python bytecode.

> and has a big
> footprint.

Yes.

> Python is reasonably nimble and good design choices pay off.
> Plus, you must write many more lines of Java to do what you can in
> Python.

Yup. The main issue with the current Java webapp seems to be
that it takes a long time to make changes/additions.

> I do not know the code you are not working with, but a lot of
> large Java apps can be poorly written.

I've found that good documentation is *most* critical. At least
if the docs are good, but the code needs work, you have some
direction as to how to fix the code. If there's no docs, you
spend hours wondering why things are done the way they're done.

Currently having a look at the Django docs. :)

Thanks Brian!
---J
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