----- Original Message ----- From: "LEE, Kwan Soo" <kslee@plaza1.snu.ac.kr> To: <zope@zope.org> Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 1:16 PM Subject: [Zope] Phil Greenspun on ACS and ZOPE
and more on ACS vs ZOPE here: http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp (at the 2nd finding "ZOPE", I've not noticed this before. Did any one?)
This looks new. It looks like part ArsDigita University, so it probably *is* new.
I've enjoyed his writings and they definitely broadened my sight. But somewhat feel we are challenged (or are we challenging?)
There really is a lot of good reading to do over there. One good thing about Open Source is that we (zopefolk) can learn from the lessons they (ACSfolk) have learned.
See the "Our Data Model" section and what follows there of http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/bookmarks.html. I think even myself can implements not so difficultly what he boasts, except "the Ability to correlate your bookmarks with other users with similar interests". Yes, I know there is ZCatalog and ZSQL but his characterization of ACS and ZOPE)"ACS is the thinnest possible layer on top of Oracle and Zope has its own set of abstractions") half bought me, though the price tag of Oracle repels more, ;-)
A very Zope-centric application *would* be hard to migrate to another application platform. But, I feel that the Zope object model allows for much cleaner application design than an RDBMS. There are some things you can do easily with the ZODB and ZCatalog that would be somewhat messy in a RDBMS. Interestingly enough, Greenspun talks about how SQL is a standard and (in theory) it should be easy to move to another database. While it would certainly be easier to move to another DB than it would be to move from Zope to ACS, you should take a look over at the ACSpg (postgres) page... actually, it appears that they've changed the name to "OpenACS" and put the page at http://openacs.org Anyhow, it looks like they've had some fun times getting ACS to work on PostgreSQL, so it's not quite as simple as just plugging in a new database. Kevin