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R. Strobl:
"Component-Based Development: A comparison of Enterprise Java Beans and Zope";
Supervisor: F. Puntigam; Institut für Computersprachen, 2006.

Component-based development is the process of building applications from components to improve the quality of the system, reduce the time-to-market, and force a modular and flexible architecture of the application. Although the Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 2.1 component technology (based on Java) is today one of the market leaders programmers criticize it especially for its complexity. The Zope 3 framework targets the Python programming language which speeds up development and reduces the amount of code. The main goal of this work is to evaluate if and to which extend Zope 3 can be a replacement for EJB 2.1 under the assumption of a free choice of the programming language. We try to find an answer by comparing both models over a list of basic requirements/concepts considering aspects of distributed component technology. We will see that each component model has got strengths as well as weaknesses. On the one hand Zope's simplicity and clarity can speed up development time and reduce the overhead and costs of deployment and installation since Zope by default includes a Web server and an object-based database. However, the unforced interface compliance, the missing distributed object model, and missing support of CORBA form the other side of the coin.