[Chris McDonough, on Thu, 14 Oct 1999]: :: He argues that Python, and therefore Zope, cannot connect to COM objects (or :: other ORB systems), and that for this reason Zope is not even really an :: application server. Its a design criticism. If I were you, I'd just drop it with this guy. He doesn't know what he's talking about regarding Python or Zope. But for the record, Python has full and transparent access to COM through Mark Hammond's and Greg Stein's win32.com, by which Python can do just about anything you can do from any other language -- write COM clients, servers, ActiveX scripting hosts, etc. And as for other ORBs (not to mention Zope's own), there's ILU and FNORB, if you want CORBA. And XML-RPC for that matter (and I wouldn't be surprised if Frederik Lundh appears with Python SOAP hooks momentarily). BTW, watch Microsoft over the next six months. You'll see them madly deemphasizing COM and pushing SOAP as the magic glue of the Internet.