Python + Zope compared to J2EE and .Net

[Gerhard Häring]

Sig wrote:
> [company trying to consolidate IT infrastructure and decide on preferred technology,
> probably either J2EE or .NET.
> 
> I would like to promote Zope as good alternative to examine. But I
> don't know how I should position Zope as a serious challenger
> solution. Is there a hope for Zope in big corporations ?

ZOPE certainly has it's places for intranet as well as extranet 
applications. It's scope is more limited than that of J2EE or .NET 
though. It's basically a (web) application server. J2EE/.NET can be used 
for more than that.

> I may suggest to my IT boss scenariis such as :
> 
> A. Zope is the best solution for every of our intranet needs, I would
> name it LAMP(Z) = Linux + Apache + Mysql + Python (+Zope)

*Cough*. The words "enterprise" and MySQL don't go together for me. For 
an Open Source database that can be used as a preferred general-purpose 
RDBMS I'd suggest PostgreSQL. In any case ZOPE is pretty 
database-agnostic, there are database adapters (DA's) for all major RDBMS.

>  - cons => Zope may be to heavy for simple needs we could easily
> manage with PHP, Zope skills are rather rare of the market whereas PHP
> is now quite easily available.

PHP skills may be easily available, but I have my doubts wrt. to 
maintainability of PHP. The little I saw until know from PHP I didn't 
like at all.

>  - risks => Wouldn't it be to much closed ? Would it be opened enough
> for integrating it with our ERPs (SAP), business intelligence
> solutions (Business Objects, Hyperion, ...), with transactional
> systems ?

I have no idea about all this stuff, but I suppose integration works via 
either a Java API or a SOAP/XML-RPC/CORBA interface. Apart from the Java 
API, no such interface should be a problem to access via Python (or ZOPE).

> [snip]

My job requires me to work with ASP.NET and ADO.NET currently and I find 
the technology quite "sexy". The WYSIWYG editor for ASP.NET that's 
integrated into Visual Studio is quite nifty. It makes component-based 
web programming a reality.

The only downside is that realistically it ties you to the Windows 
platform and to Microsoft.

The big advantage of Java's APIs is that you can choose among multiple 
implementations, including quite good Open Source ones.

The problem with Python is that there is no *one* "solution" (gee how I 
hate these marketing words) that you can show to management types. 
You'll always have to choose among several totally different libraries 
for each task, like for example web programming.

-- Gerhard