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This section is somewhat dated. We plan to update it soon.

A natural question to ask is why one would choose Spyce over JSP, ASP, PHP, or any of the other HTML scripting languages that perform a similar function. We compare Spyce with an array of exising tools:

• Java Server Pages, JSP, is a widely popular, effective and well-supported solution based on Java Servlet technology. Spyce differs from JSP in that it embeds Python code among the HTML, thus providing a number of advantages over Java.
  • Python is a high-level scripting language, where rapid prototyping is syntactically easier to perform.
  • There is no need for a separate "expression langauge" in Spyce; Python is well-suited for both larger modules and active tag scripting.
  • Python is interpreted and latently typed, which can be advantageous for prototyping, especially in avoiding unnecessary binary incompatibility of classes for minor changes.
  • Spyce code is of first-order in the Spyce language, unlike JSP, which allows you to create useful Spyce lambda functions.
  • Creating new active tags and modules is simpler in Spyce than in JSP.
  • Spyce is better-integrated than JSP; to get similar functionality in JSP, you have to add JSF (Java Server Faces) and Tiles, or equivalents.

• PHP is another popular webserver module for dynamic content generation. The PHP interpreter engine and the language itself were explicitly designed for the task of dynamic HTML generation, while Python is a general-purpose scripting language.
  • Spyce leverages from the extensive development effort in Python: since any Python library can be imported and reused, Spyce does not need to rebuild many of the core function libraries that have been implemented by the PHP project.
  • Use of Python often simplifies integration of Spyce with existing system environments.
  • Spyce code is also first-order in the Spyce language and Spyce supports active tags.
  • Spyce is modular in its design, allowing users to easily extend its base functinality with add-on modules.
  • The Spyce engine can be run from the command-line, which allows Spyce to be used as an HTML preprocessor.
  Spyce, like PHP, can run entirely within the process space of a webserver or via CGI (as well as other web server adapters), and has been benchmarked to be competitive in performance.
• ASP.NET is a Microsoft technology popular with Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) users. Visual Basic .NET and C# are both popular implementation languages.
  • Spyce provides the power of the ASP.NET "component" development style without trying to pretend that web applications live in a stateful, event-driven environment. This is a leaky abstraction that causes ASP.NET to have a steep learning curve while the user learns where the rough edges are.
  • ASP.NET is not well-supported outside the IIS environment. Spyce can currently run as a standalone or proxy server, under mod_python (Apache), or under CGI and FastCGI, which are supported in the majority of web server environments. Adapters have also been written for Xitami, Coil, Cheetah -- other web servers and frameworks.
  • Spyce is open-source, and free.
• WebWare with Python Server Pages, PSP, is another Python-based open-source development. PSP is similar in design to the Spyce language, and shares many of the same benefits. Some important differences include
  • Spyce supports both Python chunks (indented Python) as well as PSP-style statements (braced Python).
  • Spyce supports active tags and component-based development
  • Spyce code is first-order in the Spyce language
  PSP is also an integral part of WebWare, an application-server framework similar to Tomcat Java-based application server of the Apache Jakarta project. Spyce is to WebWare as JSP is to Tomcat. Spyce is far simpler to install and run than WebWare (in the author's humble opinion), and does not involve notions such as application contexts. It aims to do only one thing well: provide a preprocessor and runtime engine for the dynamic generation of HTML using embedded Python.
• Zope is an object-oriented open-source application server, specializing in "content management, portals, and custom applications." Zope is the most mature Python web application development environment, but to a large degree suffers from second-system syndrome. In the author's opinion, Zope is to a large degree responsible for the large number of python web environments: a few years ago, it was de rigeur for talented programmers to try Zope, realize it was a mess, and go off to write their own framework.

  Zope provides a scripting language called DHTML and can call extensions written in Perl or Python. Spyce embeds Python directly in the HTML, and only Python. It is an HTML-embedded language, not an application server.