zope and jboss or weblogic

[Paul Boddie]

Gerhard Häring <gerhard at bigfoot.de> wrote in message news:<mailman.1019890132.10241.python-list at python.org>...
> * Wenshan Du <python at dohao.org> [2002-04-26 21:51 -0700]: > hi,
> > I like zope, I want to know what's the difference between zope and
> > jboss or weblogic? which is better? Can python & zope replace J2EE?
> > 
> Not only do Zope and J2EE play in a different league, but it's also
> different kinds of sports.

Indeed. Zope seems to lend itself especially to "content management"
applications, whereas J2EE doesn't provide specific "application
readiness" - instead the elementary building blocks are provided,
although projects do extend upon the basic J2EE features to support
different kinds of applications.

> J2EE is really only a bunch of so-called enterprise-APIs thrown together
> and made sure the versions of the selected APIs work well together.

It would seem that the J2EE standards don't move particularly quickly,
but sometimes the most interesting features might not always be
available to you in a certain project because the application server
in use does not support them yet - container-managed persistence
"version 2.0" is a good example of this right now.

> These APIs include data persistence, distributed computing, others I
> don't remember, and last but not least, a web application framework
> (servlets) with a everybody-has-it-so-we-too code-in-HTML solution
> (JSP). OTOH, I don't know (yet), what ZOPE really is about.

JSP is a "me too" solution, in my opinion, but there are always
opportunities to choose different/better, but non-J2EE-standard,
technologies as well. In several respects, Zope acts like a J2EE
servlet container, but has tighter "object persistence" integration.

> Many of these APIs are overhyped and have a lot of potential to be used
> incorrectly, IMO especially EJBs.
> 
> If I were to compare J2EE with a Python solution, I'd first construct
> something equivalent in Python, i. e. a bunch of similar APIs thrown
> together, like "WebWare for Python" (servlets, code-in-HTML, MiddleKit
> for object-relational mapping), a distributed computing framework like
> PYRO or omniORBpy, etc.

Webware for Python acts rather like a servlet container as well, but
unlike Zope and J2EE, the motivation behind the Webware project seems
to be to keep components as close to fundamental language techniques
and practices as possible - in contrast, learning Zope and J2EE can
often seem like learning completely new technologies.

Paul

P.S. I started a comparison between J2EE and Python Web frameworks,
but it isn't available on the Web just yet.