Would Python be suitable for a sports statistics website?

[britt.jonathan89]

First off I wanted to apologize for the lack of specificity in my subject title. I am a relative newbie to programming and need some advice. I tried StackOverflow but was sort of turned away for not having code in my post.

I have been assigned by an internship with my university's athletic department, to create a statistics website to be used by sports media during games.. What this means is that the statistics are generated by a stats computer into an XML file and I am wanting to parse this XML file and place it on the web quickly. Not necessarily in real-time but in a matter of a couple of seconds. I'd like to make a clean, simple website to start off with that displays these statistics.

I've been playing around with Javascript and jQuery and as a beginning programmer have really been in over my head. What I want to do is start completely over and actually try to learn a language before diving in.

My question is, would Python be a suitable language for developing a website / web application that performs these tasks? I've been researching Pythonand it is the language I am most interested in learning. I've been messingaround with IDLE and have really enjoyed the syntax. I've also been reading about Django / Tornado etc. Thank you all so much for your time.

 

[Jeff Sandvik]

Python is definitely suitable for that sort of task.

Django is good for this sort of thing, but I’d also like to mention using Flask (http://flask.pocoo.org), especially if you are a beginner. I use it for some of my work, and you could potentially get your project up and running that much quicker since it is a fairly light-weight web framework. The only thing is you’ll be missing out on some of the more convenient features that Django introduces.

 

[Roy Smith]

I have been assigned by an internship with my university's athletic
department, to create a statistics website to be used by sports media during
games. What this means is that the statistics are generated by a stats
computer into an XML file and I am wanting to parse this XML file and place
it on the web quickly. Not necessarily in real-time but in a matter of a
couple of seconds. I'd like to make a clean, simple website to start off with
that displays these statistics.

I've been playing around with Javascript and jQuery and as a beginning
programmer have really been in over my head. What I want to do is start
completely over and actually try to learn a language before diving in.

My first thought is that this is a really ambitious project for a
beginning programmer.

My second thought is that maybe you want to bypass most of the work by
having a mostly static site (which you can build with any number of
Content Management Systems, even something like WordPress). Then, have
a process which takes the XML, parses it (you would use Python's lxml
library), and produces a HTML file containing the formatted scores. You
could then include you HTML in the static site by way of an iframe, or
something like that.