[anuraggoel]

Apache Lucene, Solr and Wicket are all great, light-weight open source Java projects.

Ted Dziuba's argument doesn't seem to be Java vs. Python for large projects - it's more statically typed vs. dynamically typed languages and checked vs. run-time exceptions - or compile-time error checking vs. run-time error checking.

There are several large companies that use Python for X and Java for Y. I don't think either language has significant advantages for large projects that the other doesn't have, assuming that developers can utilize the strengths of the language. I was working with someone who wanted to implement a prepaid card application (the ultimate enterprisy app) and his biggest objection to using Python was the inability to find Python developers in India. He was going to pay the bills, and I didn't have a counter-argument.