java introduction for pythonistas

[Jon Perez]

"Ype Kingma" <ykingma at accessforall.nl> wrote in message news:3e3565f3$0$145$e4fe514c at dreader7.news.xs4all.nl...
> Alex Polite wrote:
>
> >
> > I've been working a few years with python. I'm  rather confident with
> > basic OO design principles. Now some people that I consult for might
> > be moving to Java. So I need to get up to speed with java. Are there
> > any good documents out there for people with a python background
> > coming to Java.
>
> 1) Give them Jython to revert to, and hope they'll only use Java for
>    performance critical things.

Jython is definitely slower than CPython and only recommended if
you're married to the Java platform and APIs.  Python is already
cross-platform on its own and hence is a worthwhile alternative to
Java in many situations.  For performance critical stuff, writing
your C extensions is the way to go.  One would need to make the
Java/Jython tradeoff only if there's some functionality present in
the Java APIs you don't get with the Python library and are not
willing to code it in C for each platforms you wish to run on.

The Java APIs are vast indeed, but the libraries available for
CPython's are nothing to sneeze at either.