Programming language choice
Short document showing why I ended up with Python/Zope/Plone for my PhD thesis' implementation.
To provide background for the choice, some personal observations. Pascal (later Delphi) was my initial programming environment, resulting in DOS or Windows GUI applications. For web applications, that is not ideal (especially since the server normally runs on Linux). eConstruct brought XSLT and Java. I was disappointed in the amount of work needed to get results out of Java. A last-minute test before an eConstruct deadline with Python provided quick results and "sold" me on that language. Server-side XSLT processing with Java works well, so long as you don't need to change data. For a web-based Ontology editor I needed something that was easier to install: I didn't want to maintain mysql databases and what have you. Zope and its build-in object database ZODB looked the most promising, especially since it was coded in Python.
