Usually it's nice middle tier is a long running process. It can be programmed in an OO style, and in a *stateful* manner.

It looks like Zope's answer here is to write Python classes that get used as external methods. What's not clear to me is how these Python objects live and die, and when.

I think you leave out one critical thing. The business objects should be callable by all potential users of your system. the idea is the abstract out the business logic so that both your internal employees, intranet users, internet users and maybe even VPN nodes all use the same core business logic layer. Other then perhaps CORBA based middle layers I don't know of any way to achieve this ideal though. It baffles me that this simple and obvious need is not being filled with today's technology. Especially considering the myriad of languages that each part of the enterprise is using. Javascript on the browser ==> Python/PERL on the web server ==> C/C++/Java business layer ==> PL/SQL or other proprietary language on the database. Of course if SUN cared enough to make the applet a viable technology all of our problems would be solved. We could use Java on every layer (including the database server if you are using oracle). Too bad though I have yet to see a decent data entry tool written as a java applet. ---------------------------------------------- Tim Uckun Mobile Intelligence Unit. ---------------------------------------------- "There are some who call me TIM?" ----------------------------------------------