Dealing with marketing types...

[Kay Schluehr]

flyingfred0 wrote:
> A small software team (developers, leads and even the manager when he's
> had time) has been using (wx)Python/PostgreSQL for over 2 years and
> developed a successful 1.0 release of a client/server product.
>
> A marketing/product manager has brought in additional management and
> "architecture" experts to propose moving the entire thing to a Java
> (application server) platform for the next release.  They want a
> "scalable, enterprise solution" (though they don't really know what that
> means) and are going crazy throwing around the Java buzzwords (not to
> mention XML).

The product managers and technology responsibles ( marketing people do
less technology decisions at least in those german companys I know from
inside ) may not know which is the "best" technology on the market (
who really knows? ), but he clearly knows the discourse about
technology and he is right in not spending to much trusts in the
sensitivities, vanities and the pets of his developers ( Some like
dotNet, others like Java. Some believe that Perl is the hit and others
stick to "Ruby on Rails".)


> The developers (including myself) are growing uneasy; the management is
> continuing to push their requirements and ignore the engineers.  I think
> there's still hope, but I'm at a loss for ideas beyond pointing out the
> success stories of Python and Zope and language comparisons between
> Python and Java.

The difference between J2EE and Zope may be that SUN promotes it's new
major releases half a year before they enter the market ( EJB3 ) while
Zope 3 ( Zope X3 to be accurate ) vanishes for half a year after it is
released ( if you read the docs e.g. the 'roadmap' in the Zope 3 wiki
you may have the impression the project is completely dead ).

> What experiences have those in the Python community had in these kinds
> of situations?

Python projects are submarines. You have to care not to go up to soon.

Kay