Hi, I did some Python and Twisted two years ago got distracted, picked up some IBM WebSphere certifications, got turned off by the verbosity of J2EE and suspected that there was a cleaner way to do it.

I just got through Bruce Tate's O'Reilly book /Beyond Java/ and am hearing the siren call of Ruby on Rails. Tate is unwilling to champion Ruby over Python or vice versa, but waxes poetic about Rails.

I know there is a Rail-like Python project (Subway?) but I'd like to know if there is a Rail-alike that works with Twisted.

Also, I'd like to hear about the advantages of J2EE over Twisted (if any), especially in the scalability and MQ Series connectivity areas. The little project I did with Python and Twisted was a joy and would easily have taken 4X the time and effort in a compiled environment. Now that I've seen what J2EE tries to do, I'm curious to see how Twisted stacks up against the J2EE specialties.

Comparisons between Python and Ruby will also interest, especially regarding ease of metaprogramming since this seems to be the arena in which the Next Big Thing will hit software practice with aspect-oriented programming, dependency injection and mixins. Kind of like when COBOL programmers had to learn pointers to deal with C, or when C programmers had to learn about objects to deal with C++ and/or Java.

By the way, I remember the campaign to stamp out self-modifying code back during the structured programming wars of the 1970's. Although the benefits of metaprogramming are attractive, isn't metaprogramming just self-modifying code at the object level? If so, should we just say no? If not, what has changed to make it reasonable now?