Java or Python? XML or Database

Hi everyone,

I need to write a web app, that will support millions of user accounts,
template-based user pages and files upload. The client is going to be
written in Flash. I wondered if I coudl get your opinions -
1. what do you think is the best language to use? Python or Java? And
I'm talking scalability, object oriented, development tools etc.
2. I heard poeple saying that if I have no complex queries, I I should
store stuff in the file system, as XML, no RDBMS. What do you think?

Thanks for any opinion!
And Happy New 2006,
Lior

liorm@noks.com wrote:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I need to write a web app, that will support millions of user accounts,
> template-based user pages and files upload. The client is going to be
> written in Flash. I wondered if I coudl get your opinions -
> 1. what do you think is the best language to use? Python or Java? And
> I'm talking scalability, object oriented, development tools etc.

Get familiar with the services in j2ee. If you need some of them (you seldom
need all), Java would be suitable. I'm not very familiar with the Python
environment, but J2ee does help you build scalable applications in many
ways. There are lots of good development tools for java/j2ee, JBuilder,
JDeveloper, Eclipse, NetBeans etc.

Objectorientedness isn't really *the* most important thing to consider here.
Java has a proven record despite it's lack of multiple inheritance and
primitive types etc.

> 2. I heard poeple saying that if I have no complex queries, I I should
> store stuff in the file system, as XML, no RDBMS. What do you think?

It really depends on the application. For storing information about millions
of user accounts I really don't see what great advantage you'll get using
xml at all, except bad performance. Templates for user-pages could be
described in xml and transformed into their final form using xslt.

Maybe you should consider a ldap directory for storing all those users.

People will respond more detailed if you describe your application in more
details.

--
jon martin solaas

> I need to write a web app, that will support millions of user accounts,
> template-based user pages and files upload. The client is going to be
> written in Flash. I wondered if I coudl get your opinions -
> 1. what do you think is the best language to use? Python or Java? And
> I'm talking scalability, object oriented, development tools etc.
> 2. I heard poeple saying that if I have no complex queries, I I should
> store stuff in the file system, as XML, no RDBMS. What do you think?
>
1 )Python or Java, which do you know best?
Java has the better tool support (and that probably includes scalability),
Python looks nice too.

2) they would be right for small amounts of data, but with millions of users
you're talking of a massive amount of data and that means an RDBMS is the
way to go (or possibly an OODBMS would be better).