[Twisted-Python] Rails? Twisted versus J2EE? Metaprogramming as self-modifying code?

John Benson jsbenson at bensonsystems.com
Wed Dec 14 03:40:47 EST 2005


Hi, I did some Python and Twisted two years ago got distracted, picked 
up some IBM WebSphere certifications, got turned off by the verbosity of 
J2EE and suspected that there was a cleaner way to do it.

I just got through Bruce Tate's O'Reilly book /Beyond Java/ and am 
hearing the siren call of Ruby on Rails. Tate is unwilling to champion 
Ruby over Python or vice versa, but waxes poetic about Rails.

I know there is a Rail-like Python project (Subway?) but I'd like to 
know if there is a Rail-alike that works with Twisted.

Also, I'd like to hear about the advantages of J2EE over Twisted (if 
any), especially in the scalability and MQ Series connectivity areas. 
The little project I did with Python and Twisted was a joy and would 
easily have taken 4X the time and effort in a compiled environment. Now 
that I've seen what J2EE tries to do, I'm curious to see how Twisted 
stacks up against the J2EE specialties.

Comparisons between Python and Ruby will also interest, especially 
regarding ease of metaprogramming since this seems to be the arena in 
which the Next Big Thing will hit software practice with aspect-oriented 
programming, dependency injection and mixins. Kind of like when COBOL 
programmers had to learn pointers to deal with C, or when C programmers 
had to learn about objects to deal with C++ and/or Java.

By the way, I remember the campaign to stamp out self-modifying code 
back during the structured programming wars of the 1970's. Although the 
benefits of metaprogramming are attractive, isn't metaprogramming just 
self-modifying code at the object level? If so, should we just say no? 
If not, what has changed to make it reasonable now?





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