Why isn't Python king of the hill?

[Martijn Faassen]

Geoffrey  Gerrietts <geoff at homegain.com> wrote:

[snip]
> DTML and Zope are a mixed bag, too. Designers who are used to working in PHP
> or ASP find DTML to be a little clunky, and having several designers working
> on the same site has exposed a lot of the weaknesses in the
> 'browser-as-editor' model to us.

DTML is clunky, and browser-as-editor has problems (but also major
advantages). Better integration with version control systems like CVS
would however be very nice. Note that Digital Creations (including Guido) is
busy developing Zope Page Templates, which should be a lot cleaner than
DTML.

> I should note that we're using an old
> version of Zope, but I'm not sure newer versions would solve the biggest
> gripes I hear.

Newer versions do support through-the-web Python scripts, which makes the
threshold to write a little bit of python glue instead of reams of
dirty DTML a lot lower.

> We are resolving these problems, and continuing to work in Python and Zope.
> I am glad for this, mostly because I like writing Python code. However.

> Scaling our python app across fifteen or sixteen boxes has been a challenge.
> We have to make a lot of tradeoffs in the way we handle things. We have to
> roll our own session management, we have to roll our own
> database/persistence toolkit; our RPC mechanisms are add-ons. We have these
> things, now, so a revamp in J2EE wouldn't really help us much.

How does Zope's ZEO fit in this picture? I would think it'd help scale a Python
app across a lot of boxes, right? Zope of course has a persistence toolkit;
the ZODB. RPC mechanisms exist for Zope as well; for instance XML-RPC.  
How were these not satisfactory? 

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
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