Why did Nuxeo Switch from Python/Zope to Java/Seam?
Nuxeo (formerly CPS) is a major open source enterprise content management system. After all, it already has multi-million dollar deployments in places ranging from French Nuclear Agency to Fortune 500 companies. Recently, Nuxeo announced that they would re-write the next version of their product in Java, and build it around the JBoss Seam framework (together with other Java EE and Eclipse frameworks).
Normally, it takes a lot for such a mature and successful project to switch platform and “start from scratch”. The new platform must be substantially “better” in order to justify the switch. So, what are the reasons for Nuxeo? Well, it is the best to hear it from the Nuxeo guys themselves! Checkout the Nuxeo presentations at the recent JBoss World conference in Berlin. For the impatient, Nuxeo seems to be able to take advantage of all key Seam features:
* Improve usability of JSF (e.g., much improved validation, bookmarkable URL etc.)
* Make ORM (e.g., Hibernate) work better with web applications (e.g., no lazy ladoing errors)
* Automatically manage cached content in finely grained contexts
* Manage the application state better than just jamming everything into the HTTP session (e.g., nested conversation, multiple browser windows support etc.)
* Integrate business processes
* Add AJAX features to complex stateful applications
* Take advantage loosely coupled components and Seam dependency bi-jection
* Take advantage of the built-in asynchronous event and method invocation model in Seam
Checkout the presentation and see all those for yourself! I think it is interesting because I keep hearing how dynamic language like Python or Ruby would “kill Java” — guess not so fast!