Python Rocks! and other rants
Weblog of Kent S Johnson

#4 2004-03-27 20:04:00

Python or Jython?

I have just finished a pretty good size project using Jython and Java. It was my first Jython application and I think it was very successful.

Now I am starting a new project and trying to decide whether to use Jython again or to use CPython. It's a tough choice.

In favor of Jython:

It fits in better with my company's Java culture.
I love dom4j. I used if for the domain model in the last project. The integrated XPath is really handy.
I like Velocity too.

So using Jython gives me access to familiar tools and to possibly useful legacy code from other projects.

On the other hand, Python has

All the cool stuff from Python 2.2 and 2.3 like generators and enum
Maybe better GUI toolkits (Tkinter and wxPython)
Much faster! A program I wrote to explore the dataset is several times faster in Python than Jython.
I don't have to deal with the cracks in the integration between Java and Jython.

Then there is always Groovy!

Categories: Python, Java

#3 2004-03-25 22:58:56

Groovy

I'm playing around with Groovy. It gets a lot right - easy access to lists and maps and first-class function objects, for example. Much of Groovy is 'just' major syntactic sugar for Java. Which is a good thing!

This page is a good start for figuring out why you might care... http://wiki.codehaus.org/groovy/WhyGroovy

Groovy

Categories: Java

#2 2004-03-25 22:50:24