Python Enterprise Objects

[Paul Boddie]

Ian Bicking <ianb at colorstudy.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1020924858.18267.python-list at python.org>...
> On Thu, 2002-05-09 at 00:34, Christopher Browne wrote:
> > More seriously, it tends to involve tighter integration between the
> > language environment and "database stuff" so that when you invoke
> > methods, they are rather more likely to be tied to objects that are
> > persistent even against fairly severe failure.  
> 
> So, J2EE is sort of an object-relational mapper?  Or a framework for
> creating such a mapper?  I.e., a middleware-creation-toolkit?

J2EE is so many things, but I'll try and summarise them instead of
pointing you back to the Sun J2EE site, which is almost as
badly-designed as Sun's other sites.

In many respects, J2EE attempts to address the same kinds of areas
that various Python Web frameworks (blatant promotion of Web page -
see below) cover:

Servlets - server-side programs which respond to requests, typically
over HTTP, although other protocols aren't exactly ruled out.

JSP (JavaServer Pages) - a presentation technology which is much like
ASP and countless "Python Server Pages" technologies.

EJB (Enterprise JavaBeans) - unlike the much-hyped, but easy-to-grasp
JavaBeans concept, components written to the EJB specifications
specifically attempt to cover the area of "business logic", and
provide support for things like transactions involving many different
objects and databases.

Object-relational support is only really addressed in "container
managed entity beans" which form a small part of the whole EJB thing.
Prior to version 2.0 of the EJB specification, the "container managed"
part - meaning that the mapping to relational database tables was done
on your behalf - was more or less a toy, in my opinion, because there
apparently wasn't a standard way of describing relations between
objects.

Really, the benefit of J2EE is the standardisation of the way people
write their server-side applications; that's something which we
haven't yet seen in the Python community, but then there's still a lot
of diversity on top of J2EE in terms of frameworks which actually
provide application-specific solutions to real-world problems.

Blatant Web site promotion:

  http://www.boddie.org.uk/python/web_frameworks.html

At some point, I'll work on and upload the Python vs. J2EE comparison
document I was writing.

Paul