Recently due to a project(I am part of a group building a next generation operating system, which would allow seamless resource sharing on a global scale) complication I decided to ditch a particular component and implement it in another alternative language. I explored various possibilities. The component is a SOAP web service based thing. It was previously implemented in C, using the Axis2/C framework. The initial impetus to use the Axis2/C framework was to make a web service based component which was as fast as possible. But the problem is that Axis2/C is not mature, it hasn't even crossed the 1.0 milestone! The component was riddled with segmentation faults. It only worked in Slackware 10.2! When we upgraded to Slackware 11.0 in our lab, the component stopped working! I spent some 8 hours trying to debug it but to no avail! I finally decided to ditch the component and implement it another language which was more productive than C and didnt have manual memory management. I had numerous alternatives, Java, which I found to be too resource demanding; PERL, the problem with perl was that I am the only one in the team who knows PERL, and I would have to implement everything myself, I finally settled on a combination of Php and Python. I read somewhere that Python had bad performance as compared to php in hosted applications. So I decided that the server side portion of the component is to be php based and the client side portion is python based, and we have ample expertise in the group in both php and python.
With this effort I hope to dive into python and contrast it to Perl, I will write a subjective comparison of the two languages soon.
