For most purposes Jython 2.1 is just fine. The lack of recent features is not a show stopper. What do you need metaclasses? decorators? BTW, there is Jython 2.2 as an alpha release.
There are a number of ways you can use Java code through Python. Use JPype to start a Java VM http://jpype.sourceforge.net/ Or compile using GCJ and expose as a DLL/SO or better yet, make a SWIG extension. A good example for this is PyLucene. Python/Java Wrapper Generator http://www.rexx.com/~dkuhlman/generate_wrappers.html simplifies the process. Or use some standard interop mechanism. Write an XMLRPC/SOAP/CORBA and script via Python. This is similar to the COM approach. Or maybe, you can look into XPCOM. I have no experience with it. And finally a bit more perverse approach that I used once. Converted Java bytecode to CIL with IKVM. http://www.ikvm.net/ And then I used Python for .NET (http://www.zope.org/Members/Brian/PythonNet), a really well implemented integration module if I ever saw one, to access the code. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list