[Zope] Re: Java vs Zope

[Floyd May]

At the risk of contributing to the usual "my programming language is better
than yours" holy war, I'll throw in $0.02(US):

There are a few things that make Zope a noteworthy alternative to a HTML +
Java web server:

   1. Python is much less rigid in terms of types than Java, and it has
   nifty stuff like getAttr().  I've never seen an easy-to-use, built-in API in
   any other web-oriented programming language that lets me locate and use
   object fields and methods by entering a string value for the identifier.
   This often means that knowing the type of an object becomes less important -
   it just needs to contain the methods and attributes you need to use. If the
   object doesn't have what you need, Python gives you plenty of facilities to
   discover which methods/fields are missing and recover gracefully.  Computer
   science purists often perch themselves on soapboxes and preach the value of
   rigid type-safety; Python is a shining example of when type-safety isn't
   always desirable.
   2. Python has simple syntax for tuples, lists, and dictionaries.
    3. Zope is anal-retentive about valid XHTML and XML - a wonderful
   feature as the web moves into the future.  Zope just won't let things fly if
   they don't validate against the parser.
   4. ZPT - a scripting language that integrates itself within the DOM.
   ZPT dissipates many of the easy-to-miss mistakes regarding
   programming-language constructs like conditional blocks and iteration, as
   well as exposes the contents of those iterated or condition-protected blocks
   to XML or XHTML validation.
   5. Acquisition - a wonderful feature that helps to unify a large
   application by making objects easily reachable without having to memorize
   and use long paths.
   6. Permissions - Zope has a fine-grained permissions model built in.
   This is a life-saver for web applications that require authentication,
   especially if they accommodate different classes of users.
   7. Object-oriented database storage - this puts all the power of
   acquisition, containment, and security into your storage backend with
   minimal marshalling from the database storage into the web page.

IMHO, Java as a web language is still much better suited for stuff like
applets.  However, you could conceivably take a language like Java and build
a Zope-like server around it, and probably reap some benefits from Java that
you would have difficulty acquiring from Python.

fm

On 1/6/06, Andreas Jung <lists at andreas-jung.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> --On 6. Januar 2006 10:06:55 -0500 Asad Habib <ahabib at engin.umich.edu>
> wrote:
>
> > Well, the class is simply a construct that Java uses to define an
> object.
> > Also, the concept of object is well defined in Java which makes it
> easier
> > for the programmer to know what can and cannot be done. In Python, it is
> > not as explicit. Java is a programming language and hence cannot be
> > compared directly to a scripting language such as Python or PHP. These 2
> > types are designed for different purposes.
> >
> >
>
> Python is not a programming language??? huh......the difference is that
> Java is compiled and Python is interpreted. I agree that PHP is not a
> programming language but just a weird mixture of HTML and _something_
> programming-language-like :-)
>
> -aj
>
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