[Zope] Re: Zope XML Roadmap

[Amos Latteier]

At 10:34 AM 7/21/99 +0200, Michael Rose  wrote:
>There is a fair amount of XML capability in the Python XML-SIG, but 
>there is even more capability in various Java/XML packages and with 
>the use of JPython these packages can be integrated seamlessly with 
>the XML-SIG packages - no glue code required. If Zope could run under 
>JPython then a very large amount of XML/XSL/DOM capability would be 
>automatically available.

Yes, nice as the Python libraries are, there is probably more Java software
than python software right now. Still I wouldn't discount the python
libraries, there's a lot of very cool stuff there; it's true that Python
comes with "batteries included". If you have a specific gripe about xml
support under Python I think that you'll find the xml-sig folks to be very
receptive.

>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)

I hate to rain on your parade, but I believe that getting all of Zope
running under JPython would be a *large* undertaking. Just take a look at
ZODB ;-) But don't let that stop you from trying, I'd love to be proved wrong.

Getting parts of Zope running under JPython is not hard. In fact, a long
time ago, I posted patches (to the bobo list, I think) to get the Zope ORB
to run under JPython. IIRC I also got ZopeHTTPServer running under JPython,
but despite being a long running process it was dog slow.

Running Zope under JPython would be cool, but I don't think that it would
be a very practical way to beef up its xml capabilities. OTOH, I can
imagine lots of other cool things you could do, like extend ZPublisher to
publish collections of Java Beans...

Good luck!

-Amos