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Symphony in Python (was Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Continuation of Doug's Colloquium)


Hi Tony,    (01)

These are all important points you make.    (02)

It turns out that while Python, or even Ruby may be much closer to ideal 
(whatever that means) programming environments, many of us, I think Gregory 
Rawlins included, got started earlier with Java, and Java continues to stay 
under our skins so long as others continue to support it in the massive 
ways they already are.  Hewlett Packard funded the development of DSpace at 
MIT (www.dspace.org), and the Apache Foundation keeps tossing enormous 
pools of useful (sometimes) stuff at us.  IBM tosses tons of stuff into the 
pool, and there is a free, commercial JVM available that makes Java 
programs run nearly as fast as C programs (wintel boxes only).    (03)

Zope is the closet entity I can think of that matches the availability of 
raw stuff to use in our projects, and, get this, Zope may actually do it 
better!  That's because, discounting DSpace, Wynona, and several other 
projects, Zope is nearly complete in terms of usable stuff.  But, (tongue 
ensconsed in cheek here), Zope is not yet known (shown?) to be as scalable 
as are the enterprise-class Java systems.  I think that to be an important 
issue; after googling that issue, and talking with a few Zope black-belts, 
I remain (for the time being) convinced of the scalability of Java 
enterprise-class projects as compared with Zope. Doing that research, I 
discovered that an important bottleneck to Zope performance is its crown 
jewel, the ZODB.  Of course, there are workarounds to that, some of which 
toss out entirely one of the nicest features of Zope.    (04)

Jython may not be the appropriate environment in which to implement an 
entire system; it's a pretty good way to script other systems, maybe 
competitive with javascript, web-ognl, and other such environments. It's 
known to be far too low on the performance scale to compete directly with 
either Python or Java for whole systems.    (05)

Finally, you say you would like to implement or participate in a project 
that implements Symphony in Python.  Make it so! Hmmm, I wonder if there is 
a Java2Python thingy out there...    (06)

Cheers
Jack
At 08:02 PM 1/27/2003 +0200, Toni wrote:
>(sorry for not replying properly - i don't have the previous post in any
>mailbox, just the web archive, so this wont have the correct in-reply-to
>pointer which might break threading. i just subscribed to the list)
>
># From: stephen white <spwhite@chariot.net.au>
>On Wednesday, January 22, 2003, at 02:48 PM, Chris Dent wrote:
> >>   http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~rawlins/symphony/symphony.html
> > developing there (pity I don't like Java!), or at least set up a
>
>the ideas from both of you seem interesting. the sidenote about Java
>(also the strong emphasis of it in Symphony) caught my eye:
>
>1. why is Symphony "targeted solely at java developers"?
>i don't (need to :) ask why Stephen dislikes it, but do wonder:
>
>2. what do you like, then? if you don't dislike Python, for example, you
>probably know that jython can be used to interface with Java quite nicely.
>
>besides interesting, i find the ideas implementable and would like to work
>on, or at least test if someone else implements, them.
>
>sincirely,
>~Toni    (07)

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