Related Entries

Interview with Ploners
Formulator makes life easy
Resetting Zope's session timeout
Getting undo history
Plone roles on

« A little too simplistic definition
» Top stories!

Server side python

Reposting comment I made on Russ' notebook here.

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:-)

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.