Hi Ray, I'm in a bit of the same boat as you only I don't get to choose my implementation language ;-)
Some of the concerns should be: - Do you have to interface with things like messaging-systems (a la JMS specs), distributed transaction managers? If so, the only way to go Python is Jython: Python for the JVM. Because AFAIK, there are no interfaces for Python to the likes of IBM's MQSeries or for any distributed transaction managers. - Is your application purely a web-based application? Or is there a large amount of application logic which is not tied to the web in any way? - Python has a number of frameworks for developing server applications, like Twisted, Zope and Django. I don't know Twisted; I know a little bit about Zope. Zope has several enterprise-level features and provides scalability/clustering. However, I've found the learning-curve for Zope to be a bit steep so far; too steep to master it in what little bits of spare time I have. (If I would have more time I'd be able to get the hang of it but I don't have enough time) I've started to toy a bit with Django and it seems to get rather easy to get started with developing a Web application using Django; however I also get the feeling that installation is a bit more involved than with Zope and that it will be not as easy to package up an application and transport it to another machine, as it is with Zope. So for development of Web-applications, I would certainly consider either Zope or Django. Both offer ways to store your data in a transactional database; Django has some object-relation mapper tools but I'm not sure how exactly Zope stores data in a SQL database (it comes with it's own powerful object-database, the ZODB but I don't know if OR mapping tools exist for Zope). However you mentioned 'development in J2EE' and J2EE applications are by no means restricted to Web interfaces. J2EE applications can have rich GUI clients, or can be without any UI at all and exist just as message-driven beans triggered by messages coming in via JMS interfaces. I wouldn't know what Python frameworks exist that would combine web-based applications with tradional GUI client/server applications and I have no idea how to listen to a queue using Python... So what are your requirements for 'J2EE' applications? And which Python framework would best fit the bill? cheers, --Tim -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
