Suitability of Python for a Big Application?

bobyu5 at mailcity.com bobyu5 at mailcity.com
Sun Dec 12 15:11:57 EST 1999


I have a project to build a multi-user database intensive application.
The 1st phase of the project will be the proof of concept to hammer out
all the technology requirements as well as the user requirements.

This application should be built using traditional programming languages
such as C++ or Java, but development time is limited to 1 year maximum
and frankly the time is not sufficient for anything but a quick
prototyping language.

This application has to run on multiple OSes, access various major
relational databases, and internet enabled, meaning that it can FTP or
send e-mails as part of its feature. Plus it has to be very easily
extensible and modifiable because modification to the requirements will
occur very frequently. Also, it has to be blazingly fast. Majority of
the heavy duty programming will be done via database programming but
tying up those stored procedures as well as supplying a sleek GUI will
be the job of this application.

And the most important of all, it has already been tried to be built
using VB 5.0 with a miserable result. (2 years of effort has still not
produced a usable application) All the issues that I have mentionned
above are more or less critical.

My job is come up with concrete recommendations on what tools to use.
After looking at various possibilities, I felt that using a scripting
language such as Perl, Rebol, TCL and Python would be the most flexible
solution.

My fantasy ideal choice would be: Rebol with some amazing and simple to
use ODBC and GUI libraries; plus I like the language itself.

But it does not for now, so I settled down on Python; however, I have 2
remaining issues on Python.

1) GUI library: I tried to look at TK library and the look and feel was
not as sleek as what comes with Windows; plus it felt very slow.
2) Math operation: there is a possibility that some heavy duty
calculation would have to be performed on around 100,000 rows of data
using Python - how slow would this be?
3) Heavy duty text processing using regexp (at least 40MB big)- I know
Perl is really fast in this regard; is Python as fast?

For 1) I thought I could solve this problem by using Zope - I get
instantly a GUI that is based upon web browsers. This eliminates those
annoying installation problems with customized DLLs as I found out using
VB development approach.

For 2) I am hoping that the Python Math Lib exists and that it is very
good.

For 3) I am also hoping that Python Regexp Lib is good.

Are my assumptions valid? Am I missing anything? Originally we wanted to
have Outlook like UI - is this kind of UI possible to build using Python
and its libraries?

Everybody seems to be using C++ or Java for projects of this scope; has
anybody tried to do something similar using Python, or even Perl?

Any anecdotes or recommendations would be heartily appreciated!


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