vsbabu.org

Server side python

Russell Beattie has a post about the subject. I made a comment on his weblog about that.

For future reference, I'm posting my comment as an entry here too.

Point to ponder: I feel kind of silly posting my comment there as a post here. Feels like duplication (well, it is) and some kind of copyright issue. Zzzz…

I chose Zope in 2000 for my needs; without knowing anything about Python or Zope. I was a hard-core C/Java, Perl, PHP kind of guy. Since I work for a non-IT firm, my needs were never about rolling out products.

Since I don't like to consider myself stupid or mad, here are some reasons

• Zope is an excellent framework. IMO, its learning curve is far smaller than any web technology out there (repeat - my goal is not to make resellable products)
• Lesser lines of code required is of great concern to me because that links directly to productivity and maintenance costs. Java/C, though it really makes code monkeys happy to keep hammering away code, raises the maintenance costs and potential bugs.
• Cross platform
• Reasonably good performance and scalability. Zope may not be a good choice to run Amazon.com (may be it is, I don't have experience for that kind of load)
• Web Services - Zope had XML-RPC with zero development effort before all these WS buzzwords started flying around.
• Pluggable and replacable components. ie., I want to develop and app on Access , it should be easy to switch to Oracle.
• Very important: database designers/programmers, Python programmers, HTML designers all should be able to work productively without even requiring to talk to each other I'm glad to report that it worked like a charm. In 2000, every other technology I checked needed people to know at least a little bit of skill in each of these areas. Half the management time goes into keeping peace between these groups.

That said, there are some aspects that could be made better in Zope. Learning curve is a bit too different for code-hammerers. Support for decent version control like CVS is absent - does any J2EE based server have provisions for versioning objects? Zope makes it easy to make code into objects managed in object database - it is pretty hard to version control these; though there are products that can do that.

About Python: it has definitely made me productive than either Java or C. Or C#. Learning curve is almost non-existant. Quite frankly, only things I like about Java over C are ant, junit, IDEs and great marketing.

However, I agree with Russ' assessment on sticking with Java. There is no reason to drop a technology you are familiar with, to pick another one that you are unfamiliar, or don't have a “good feeling”.

Side note: Even monkeys agree that Java is difficult Additionally, I believe monkeys are not going to take over the world because, they prefer Visual Basic.