I found a nicely written article about the problems with Ruby, written by a Ruby user, and why he found Python to be really good. There’s even a quote about Twisted!

And, there are a bunch of things available to a Python guy that Ruby just can’t compete with that are of particular interest to me. Two that come to mind immediately are Twisted and Stackless Python. The former was used by others at TurnTide for creating a really powerful SMTP testing tool and the latter was used by TurnTide’s competitor IronPort to build one of the industry’s best MTAs.

I didn’t knew that IronPort was done in Python, even in Stackless Python!

Finally, after such painful setups, I really never could find a really suitable configuration that could satisfy me. Here are the different methods I tried to implement TurboGears/Pylons or similar WSGI/Python projects (MoinMoin for example):

• FastCGI: So complex to setup, crashes on its own so often, and leaves running processes in memory so have to kill them each time manually to start again with a clean environment. I have to admit it is easier to configure on Lighttpd.
• SCGI: As complex as FastCGI and not so used in the world, but not bad. Too few options.
• Proxy: Redirecting on a local different port gives nore work, and as soon as you have several other virtual hosts, you’ll have to keep a registry of all your allocated ports. Painful, but easy to setup. Maybe be hard to configure if you’re using Zope, and if you need some remote information (ip address of the user for example), you’re dead!
• Direct Access: Configuring you app to run on a local ip alias on your machine and eventually configure your firewall to DNAT on it. Not that complex to setup, but requires access to you OS confiugration and many apps don’t allow you to only listen on a specific interface (MoinMoin allows it, that’s cool)
• mod_python: Loads Python into memory. Everybody shares the same namespace. Dangerous.

Now here’s a new contender, mod_wsgi written by Graham Dumpleton. That’s right, it will not work for every app. Zope, not being WSGI aware, is out of the way, except for Zope 3.x. But most of Python apps can be modded to be WSGI aware (MoinMoin is an example).