A Single Article

Making the move to Python

For the past few years I’ve been almost exclusively dedicated to PHP development. At my last job I was forced to learn Perl so I can legitimately say that I know it, but considering that PHP came about because Perl was too hard to use, I’ve always preferred PHP. With good reason too; it’s fast, it offers decent OOP with version 5, it integrates tightly with Apache and MySQL, and it’s very familiar to me as a person who did a lot of development in C. Recently, however, I’ve hit some roadblocks in my attempts to optimize PHP, and I had to find an alternative that would solve those problems. I’ve settled on Python.

In all honesty, another language is just another language, so I don’t care that Python is more syntactically elegant than PHP. My reasons for using Python, and why I would actually make such a significant move, are:

• Python actually has threading, which means I can do fire&forget processes without forcing users to wait for script completion, and job queues for operations that would normally overload the server if I tried to execute them immediately. These features make write-through and write-back caching systems very possible.
• Python has very elegant connection pooling solutions. Connection pooling is basically essential for any application that puts very high load on a database.
• Python’s Memcache client can actually handle multiple Memcache servers, which is great because it’s much more scalable and affordable to use a bunch of small, 1 GIG RAM servers than one large 4/8 GIG RAM server for your Memcache deployment.

All of these are things that are both, a) not in PHP, and b) essential to the kind of high-performance work that I want to do. So it’s decided: I’m going to start doing my new projects in Python. I’ll still be using PHP a lot for applications that I have to manage, or for working with Wordpress, but I’m excited about working with Python; it seems like the Python community is full of people who really care about performance, and there are a lot of smart things being done there (just look at Django, SQLAlchemy and Mako).