Python Web Programming - looking for examples of solid high-traffic sites

[Steve Holden]

Victor Kryukov wrote:
> Hello list,
> 
> our team is going to rewrite our existing web-site, which has a lot of
> dynamic content and was quickly prototyped some time ago.
> 
And has stayed around to dog the developers, as so many quick fixes do ...

> Today, as we get better idea of what we need, we're going to re-write
> everything from scratch. Python is an obvious candidate for our team:
> everybody knows it, everybody likes it, it has *real* objects, nice
> clean syntax etc.
> 
Yes indeedy, that's our language!

> Our main requirement for tools we're going to use is rock-solid
> stability. As one of our team-members puts it, "We want to use tools
> that are stable, has many developer-years and thousands of user-years
> behind them, and that we shouldn't worry about their _versions_." The
> main reason for that is that we want to debug our own bugs, but not
> the bugs in our tools.
> 
Given that even Apache has bugs despite its venerable status I think you 
are setting your sights a little high here.

> Our problem is - we yet have to find any example of high-traffic,
> scalable web-site written entirely in Python. We know that YouTube is
> a suspect, but we don't know what specific python web solution was
> used there.
> 
Zope? Plone? Django? TurboGears? All are handling large volumes of data 
on a daily basis, and I wouldn't use either of them (but that's just a 
personal issue).

> TurboGears, Django and Pylons are all nice, and provides rich features
> - probably too many for us - but, as far as we understand, they don't
> satisfy the stability requirement - Pylons and Django hasn't even
> reached 1.0 version yet. And their provide too thick layer - we want
> something 'closer to metal', probably similar to web.py -
> unfortunately, web.py doesn't satisfy the stability requirement
> either, or so it seems.
> 
> So the question is: what is a solid way to serve dynamic web pages in
> python? Our initial though was something like python + mod_python +
> Apache, but we're told that mod_python is 'scary and doesn't work very
> well'.
> 
Python CGI? mod_python is OK, but like all frameworks you have to be 
aware of its limitations.

> And although http://www.python.org/about/quotes/ lists many big names
> and wonderful examples, be want more details. E.g. our understanding
> is that Google uses python mostly for internal web-sites, and
> performance is far from perfect their. YouTube is an interesting
> example - anybody knows more details about that?
> 
Google use Python for all sorts of stuff.

> Your suggestions and comments are highly welcome!
> 
> Best Regards,
> Victor.
> 
I think you are chasing a chimera (and I wrote a *book* called "Python 
Web Programming").

regards
  Steve
-- 
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