Michael wrote:
As an experiment I tried making the Zope python packages under JPython instead of CPython, and I only experienced one minor hitch so far, most everything compiled straight from the make files. That of course leaves the problem of all the parts of Zope which are written in C, and I have no idea how much of a problem it is porting that to Java (or constructing a JNI interface). But it might be worth comparing the effort required to get Zope working on JPython to the effort to port existing XML/XSL and other existing Java packages to Zope (Python or C-Extensions)
Many of the pieces of Zope exist only as pure Python, such as the publisher, and other pieces have Python equivalents for the C codes, such as DocumentTemplate. The database, now that's a different story. Unfortunately I'll give the standard line here -- if it becomes important for a consulting opportunity, we'll look at it. (Surprisingly Java seems more important to the industry analysts than potential paying customers.) Otherwise, we'll encourage a community effort.
Aside from the porting effort I realize that there are speed issues, but for some of us portability and the simple extensibility offered by the JPython /Java combination outweigh speed considerations.
I'm pretty shocked to hear a claim that Java is portable. Seriously, do the xBSD, Mac OS X Server, and other non-standard platforms have reasonable Java? --Paul