[Twisted-Python] Enterprise, do you copy?

[Kevin Turner]

...hello?  Hello?  Is anyone receiving this transmission?

I heard from Dad again today, and he was grumbling about developing in
this Oracle JDeveloper environment...  Five different languages to
develop "java server[servlet?] pages", he says.  Java, because that's
where Oracle seems to be building its tools these days; then there's
Oracle's query language; then HTML for the web interfaces; and
JavaScript, because there's something that needs to be done client-side,
and, uh, what was the fifth one again?  Then there's the hundreds of
functions the wizards create for simple tasks, spread across untold
numbers of files...

Ye gods, man.  Can anyone save this tragedy?  I can't give you a
complete list of requirements, but the general gist is this:  The
laboratory has researchers and machines, the researchers do experiments
and the machines spit out data.  Quite a bit of data.  This data comes
out in raw form, needs to be stored, processed, the results stored.
It'd be nice to keep track of which data actually belongs to what run of
whose experiment -- it seems like they lose track of that every now and
then.  Anyway, data (lots, but still in the fractional-terabyte range)
stored in Oracle, and, naturally, cross-referenced with other data, and,
well, there's a lot of that going around.

The researchers, who spend most of their time knocking the brains out of
mice instead of clicking on them, need relatively friendly interfaces to
the data from their experiments, and for shoveling it around between
these various phases of analysis.  They hope to add some internet soon,
so they can pool data from their distributed colleagues.


So, I gotta ask.  What's the status of twisted.enterprise these days?
With Oracle?  Webwidgets would help with the web bit, but they'd still
need to write javascript to keep the forms from being completely dumb?
Or can you convince them that there's another interface that's portable
and *drop-dead-easy* to maintain on the client machines, which he can
use as an alternative to web?  Is there an IDE which can make up for all
the shiny things which the Oracle tools have?

If I didn't make the situation sound scary enough before, here's the
truly horrifying detail: there's another faction among the computer-guys
in the lab which wants to use _exclusively_ Perl.

I don't think it's too late.  They're still making up their minds.  But
if there's another option, they've got to know soon, before they're
wholly consumed by the dark side.  And whatever it is, it's got to do a
damn _impressive_ job of selling itself, to overcome both that warm
fuzzy feeling imparted by the "Larry Ellison" brand, and the deap
zealotry of the Perl encampment.

May peace be with you,

 - Kevin

-- 
The moon is waxing gibbous, 99.9% illuminated, 14.5 days old.