on 12/29/00 9:52 PM, corey@axcelerant.com at corey@axcelerant.com wrote:
But really, has anyone had any experience with the *other* open source Web Application Server, Enhydra?
...
At any rate, after already being *highly* impressed and sold on Zope - I ended up spending a little time at www.enhydra.org and became more and more enthused.
Zope has the advantages of a well-developed security strategy that allows an orderly delegation of management of subtrees of a site, an application framework that supports things like acquisition, a built-in object database and a broader range of freely-available (with source) applications such as Squishdot and ZWiki (this could change, but so far I haven't found a comparable set of freely-available servlets). Because you can do a good bit of development directly through the web and most sub-developers do not need access to the file system of the host machine, Zope is suited to dynamic sites with multiple developers working on separate site subcomponents. Enhydra offers Sun's Java Servlet 2.2 API, which is becoming popular for web application development in business, and it theoretically can be used with Cocoon, a very interesting XML publishing system/application manager implemented as a servlet (xml.apache.org/cocoon). Enhydra can serve standard web pages from the file system as well as manage servlets and it offers several strategies for embedding dynamic content in pages. However, page and servlet developers must have access to the host file system to mount the pages and servlets, and the Enhydra administrator probably needs to manage the final configuration of each servlet (you must edit the server's configuration files and restart the server). This would seem to lend itself better to the creation of applications that are relatively static once they are put in place. One interesting aspect of servlets is that they can be written in JPython or its successor, Jython, rather than Java and then compiled to Java byte code directly. Thus you can write your application logic in Python and have access to both the Java and Python code libraries. There is a useful servlet available called 'PyServlet' by Stefano Mazzocchi that will load JPython servlets from source code, allowing the source code files to be edited after installation (they will re-load then). I haven't tested this under complex or high load conditions, but it works pretty well with simple servlets using Tomcat (jakarta.apache.org) as a servlet container. Enhydra would also be expected to support this and I think this capability should increase the interest of the python community in Enhydra and the other standard Java servlet containers. Jim Harrison Univ. of Pittsburgh