fairly large webapp: from Java to Python. experiences?

[Shalabh Chaturvedi]

john_sips_tea at yahoo.com wrote:
> I've got a fairly substantial webapp written in Java (plus Tomcat,
> Hibernate, Struts, JSP, MySQL) that is a bit of a bear to work with. I
> didn't write it. Much of it is only very sparsely documented (if at
> all). No design docs anywhere. It's a large webapp with many classes
> and fairly deep inheritance hierarchies. There seems to be JUnit test
> cases in place.
> 
> The possibility of re-writing it has come up, and I must say that,
> although it would likely be a ton of work, it could also be a real
> pythonic adventure. ;) 
<snip>
> Any tips, stories, recommendations, and/or experiences are most
> welcome.
> 

A class-to-class and method-to-method rewrite will give some but likely 
not the full benefit of moving to Python. A redesign might be necessary 
- making it more 'Pythonic' in the process. In my experience, many cruft 
classes that exist in a Java design simply disappear when ported to 
Python. See also http://dirtsimple.org/2004/12/python-is-not-java.html

Cheers,
Shalabh