Help me in this please--is Python the answer?

[Tim N. van der Leeuw]

Hi Ray,

I'm in a bit of the same boat as you only I don't get to choose my
implementation language ;-)

Some of the concerns should be:
- Do you have to interface with things like messaging-systems (a la JMS
specs), distributed transaction managers? If so, the only way to go
Python is Jython: Python for the JVM. Because AFAIK, there are no
interfaces for Python to the likes of IBM's MQSeries or for any
distributed transaction managers.

- Is your application purely a web-based application? Or is there a
large amount of application logic which is not tied to the web in any
way?

- Python has a number of frameworks for developing server applications,
like Twisted, Zope and Django.
I don't know Twisted; I know a little bit about Zope. Zope has several
enterprise-level features and provides scalability/clustering.
However, I've found the learning-curve for Zope to be a bit steep so
far; too steep to master it in what little bits of spare time I have.
(If I would have more time I'd be able to get the hang of it but I
don't have enough time)

I've started to toy a bit with Django and it seems to get rather easy
to get started with developing a Web application using Django; however
I also get the feeling that installation is a bit more involved than
with Zope and that it will be not as easy to package up an application
and transport it to another machine, as it is with Zope.


So for development of Web-applications, I would certainly consider
either Zope or Django.
Both offer ways to store your data in a transactional database; Django
has some object-relation mapper tools but I'm not sure how exactly Zope
stores data in a SQL database (it comes with it's own powerful
object-database, the ZODB but I don't know if OR mapping tools exist
for Zope).


However you mentioned 'development in J2EE' and J2EE applications are
by no means restricted to Web interfaces. J2EE applications can have
rich GUI clients, or can be without any UI at all and exist just as
message-driven beans triggered by messages coming in via JMS
interfaces.
I wouldn't know what Python frameworks exist that would combine
web-based applications with tradional GUI client/server applications
and I have no idea how to listen to a queue using Python...


So what are your requirements for 'J2EE' applications? And which Python
framework would best fit the bill?


cheers,

--Tim