[Zope] Re: Zope XML Roadmap

[Michael Rose]

<Disclaimer>
I am very new to Zope and have just begun evaluating it, and it's XML 
capabilities in particular.
</Disclaimer>

First, I am very impressed with the Zope architecture and am happy to 
see XML being integrated into the process. I will defer specific 
comments on the XML roadmap but use the opportunity raise a more 
general question.

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.

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)

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.

Hope this wasn't too off-topic,

Michael
  ************************************************
Michael Rose
Center for Tele-Information,    Technical University of Denmark
mailto:rose@tele.dtu.dk              http://www.cti.dtu.dk/personal/rose
Multimedia in the Home - http://mmhome.cit.dk
'and what is the use of a computer' thought Alice 'without pictures 
or conversation'                      with apologies to Lewis Carroll
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