Performance java vs. python

[Krishnakant]

On Tue, 2009-05-19 at 10:42 -0700, Daniel Fetchinson wrote:
> Benchmarks always test for a given feature. The available benchmarks
> will most likely not test the feature relevant for your particular
> application simply because there are about a gazillion different ways
> of using a web framework. So the best you can do is simply test the
> bottleneck part of your application and see for yourself, <snip>
Bingo! there will be hundreds of threads on this mailing list and many
others which exactly do that.  And it also serves as a great food for
those bashing birds who just need a spart to start a flamewar.

Till date I have worked with both languages into their core as will as
with many libraries for different tasks.

Fortunately I have some assessment for web frameworks which is based
mostly on my personal experience and partially on some obvious facts.

At the outset, I have seen that python's syntax is pritty clean and as
some previous mail said on this thread, it needs just a few hours and
the language is compact enough to fit in your head.
Readers might ask, "so how is this associated with performance boosting
etc?"  
Quite a good question.  You see, the scope for making quick and suttle
changes in the code should be wide enough and easy to do as wel.

Since python has such easy and clean syntax and with the idea of
"battries included ", it is much more quicker and easier to tune the
application for many things including performance.

Since I feel comfortable with the language I am confident enough that my
code won't break too much when I try to do some serious alteration to
the code.  This alteration might now be to change the logic but to
improve performance.  This is the challenge and python is such a
language that manipulating to this level is pritty doable in short
period of time.

Secondly, Java it seems comes with a lot of bagage which might be the
case with python as well.  But some how I don't know, python seems to be
much light weight then java.
May be there are many technical reasons for this and at the web
application side it seems to be compact zippi and fast.  Again this
might be my personal assessment,and specially with database driven
application, no language can be absolutely better than the other and as
rightly suggested, test it on the bottleneck issues and fine tune that
particular part.  I have seen many apps migrating from ejb based
framework to python, particularly one I remember in pylons and the
feedback has been positive.
 
Another thing is that I personally like to use OOP *only* when needed.
Java would force me to write classes (add the over doing with static
functions ) for every thing I do including a small function just for
returning a connection object.

This again is a major reason for me to stick to python.

In addition python also can do the kind of work, j2ME can do and so I
don't think there is any serious reason for choosing java over python.
I am currently developing a major application and it is currently using
the twisted library for xmlrpc and there is a thin client in pygtk.
Right now we are in the process of moving it to turbogears2 and so far
performance on both the ends have been good.

happy hacking.
Krishnakant.