Python Rocks! and other rants 2004/3

Weblog of Kent S Johnson

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!

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

Another happy Python user!

Andy Hertzfeld says he programs in Python twice as fast as in Java!

Trying out PyDS

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