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Python for data driven website?

Micah Mayo astrophels at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 12 02:42:54 EDT 2002 
>
> You don't need to say any more than that to elicit the correct answer
> at this point, which is "what are your requirements?".
>
> You need to get a handle on what you actually need to accomplish,
> not just go on a wild search for cool technologies.  You've
> implicitly identified that you are uncomfortable with the restrictions
> of some proprietary products from certain largish companies, so one
> can infer one of your requirements is something like open or free
licensing.
True
> What else?  What kind of performance do you need?  Reliability?
> Scalability?  Ease of development or maintenance?  Prior experience
> in the technology by existing developers?
>
Definatly reliabilty/scalability. We expect anywhere from 100-1000
customers, which may or may not translate into multiple users per account.
Whatever we use need to be able to handle a gradual, or steep for that
matter, rise in use. I didn't mean to sound as if we were just looking for
cool technology. We have three person team. One older developer who has
years of experience with database programming, and two younger
intermediates. Me being one of the younger guys. The older guy is teaching
us the industry. The problem is almost all of his experience is with
microsoft products. When he decided that microsoft was not able to provide
an affordable solution, he started talking to us about a free/unix solution.
Of the three of us I am the only one with any real experience with unix(when
i was a luser teenager I thought I was cool because I ran FreeBSD as my
desktop), so I am the only one who is really comfortable in this area. So, I
get stuck with alot of research work of this sort. So, as far as the
application goes - the software is going to be a service for tax firms
available through the web only(unless a custom version is needed, which
would cost a pretty penny).  We have a preliminary version written in
access, but it is far from done. We want to do this right the first time -
we expect to spend a year working on it.So scalability is a must, as well as
general reliability. We want the design to allow change of content without
having to rewrite the front-end at all, and minimal changes in the
backend(i.e. data driven). In other words, we want to write the website
once, and have the database decide, based on user settings, what content
will be displayed. We'll have a set of tables as a template, and inside
those tables the content could vary greatly depending on the particular
customer.  So, ASP.net would work. ASP would work(but it would be harder to
code) and we believe PHP would be fine also. Again, my boss (the older guy
who knows what he's doing, kind of ;) was reading a book on python and
thought it might provide a better solution. Does that help? :)
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