Rick Capeland, SourceForge.net gave a presentation on, “How Python, TurboGears, and MongoDB are Transforming SourceForge.net”, at PyCon 2010 today in Atlanta, Georgia. Copeland discussed SourceForge’s desire to migrate off PHP code and start re-factoring their customer facing site, using a with the titled recipe of Python, TurboGears, and MongoDB. The PHP code was chosen by SourceForge to be the best technology at the time back in 1998, and SourceForge believes that a combination of Python and NoSQL is the best technology that the current times have to offer.

What was interesting was that Copeland goes on to explain that their reluctance to use Memcached due to the network overhead and object serialization and de-serialization. MongoDB can about the same performance as Memcached by utilizing local instance slaves, according to Copeland.

Copeland also recently released the open source project, Ming, which is an open source library for interfacing with MongoDB from Python. SourceForge plans to continue to re-factor more of their Web applications using the same technologies in the near future.

Copeland’s talk was interesting, and provides a different perspective on rebuilding a Web site from scratch. SourceForge is definitely breaking out the fun toys for their site redesign, and it will be interesting to see how quickly they can redesign their site and with how much manpower using these utilities.

What would also be interesting to see is a performance comparison of the site before and after the redesign on Python, TurboGears, and MongoDB.

More Resources

Rick Capland’s Talk (With Slides) http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/event/110/
MongoDB http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Home
TurboGears http://turbogears.org/