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@andreas-jung.com > wrote:


--On 6. Januar 2006 10:06:55 -0500 Asad Habib <ahabib@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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