On Mon, Jan 18, 1999 at 05:04:38PM -0800, Gabe Wachob wrote: ,----- | Hey folks- | Has anybody here had to go through the experience of selling Zope | (and Python) to your own organization over another technology (esp. | Perl/CGI)? At Findlaw, we are largely an open-source shop (though, we | find our selves still using NT/IIS for a few reasons), and the folks we | have all use Perl. I've tried to extoll the virtues of Python to the | team members, but usually the response is "Bah, Perl works, I know it, | and I don't want to learn something new". Selling python over perl can be difficult because people know perl, and python doesn't provide *functionality* that perl does not have. I believe that python is a much cleaner, much more readable and easier to maintain language... but if you go down that road you'll likely just get into a holy war. (Ever tried to get an emacs person to use vi?) | Zope seems like it could be a big part of that "sales pitch". That | is, I'd like to be able to sit down with someone and show them how to | write a "send mail to the webmasters" page without having to learn much | Python at all. Has anyone had any success doing this? Has anyone used | Zope as a way to get people using Python? [stuff deleted] | `----- I think Zope is a much easier sale than python itself. DC themselves bill Zope as more of an application server sort of tool (like Cold Fusion) than a "CGI" tool. I don't know what the Cold Fusion language looks like, but I don't think it's perl or python. Right now, everyone is trying to find ways to bring applications to the web faster. Sure, you can roll your own with perl/CGI or python/CGI, but I think more people will want libraries and tools that provide more of the basic functionality you need. And *that's* where you can really sell Zope. If people aren't as keen on python, just stress all of the great things Zope does for you: object database with an easy way to call methods and access subobjects through the web, already built web-based management interface, high-level UI structures like "tree", powerful templates that utilize acquisition, etc. Plus, I think it is a real benefit that Zope is open source. Just from reading this list, I can see that there is a growing community of contributors that can help Zope acquire more features faster than its commercial competitors. I think that one can sell Zope to a perl shop easier than selling them python... and once they get into Zope, then they'll start learning python and probably won't turn back. Kevin -- Kevin Dangoor kid@ans.net / 734-214-7349