Zope & Python

[Bill de hÓra]

"Cary O'Brien" <cobrien at Radix.Net> wrote in message
news:8s4cd1$5on$1 at saltmine.radix.net...
: I've been thinking about this a lot lately.  I am going
: to rant now.
:
: My big gripe with most web development systems is that they
: mix presentation with business logic.  Yuck.  Bad idea.
: Trust me.  (more comments below).
:
: [snip]
: >
: >Anyway XML should be your glue now.
: >
:
: I'm not convinced.

Neither am I ;-) But I'm only half joking. My point is that using
scripting/functional languages gives you massive flexibility and turnaround
wins as well as decimating development time. They're not web programming
glue they're more like the top layer of a well decoupled network
architecture. The only layer above these languages is code that writes code.


: All the CPUS are now going to spend all their time packing and unpacking
: giant XML trees rather than doing real work.

This is a problem if you're keeping the trees in memory typically as DOMs,
Streaming apis like SAX can save your bacon. And 1: at least you'll never
have to write another file parser, 2: your data is guaranteed to be correct.
The biggest problem with XML aside from a rash of superfluous specs is how
you get it to be friends with a relational database, other than stufffing it
away as blobs.


: How many broken java programs have you dealt with?  How many mystery JVM
: errors have you seen?  How much time have you spent fighting with
: JVM incompatibilities.  Now change java to python and JVM to PVM.
: Different story, eh?

Let's not forget scaling. For all the EJB/J2EE hype about mobile and
distributed architectures, you can't move live objects between jvms without
a lot of work. And there are times when you want more than rmi/rpc,  you
actually want to code to move to a different node. Telescript could do this
almost a decade ago, I expect it was available in Lisp in the seventies,
what wasn't?. Though, even if you could enable this, the jvm specification
is so ambiguous you could never guarantee that the object will actually run.

: But my *MAJOR* gripe about Java is that it doesn't play well with
: others.  Look at JINI.  If you want to talk JINI you *MUST* have
: a JVM so that you can load the interface code.  What if I don't want
: to pay the cpu and memory price for a JVM?  What if I don't want to
: download someone elses java classes into my interpreter?  OK, so
: XML and XMLRPC are going go be the lingua fraca (?sp) of the new
: software world.

More like SOAP over HTTP.

-Bill de hÓra