Iwan van der Kleyn wrote at 2003-11-28 00:54 +0100:
... * Zope is often criticised for its perceived lack of documentation. Although the current Zope book seems to have improved greatly, I still miss a good reference guide/book on advanded topics (the Development Guide seems to have stuck at version 2.4 and is rather limited). Which book(s) can fullfill this role?
The last big change was for Zope 2.2. With respect to product development, Zope 2.6 is quite like Zope 2.4. New things (sessions, page templates) are covered in the Zope Book.
* Zope seems to lack a dominant development methodology/paradigm. DOT.NET has got form-based ASP.NET/ADO.NET, Java has MVC with Struts/J2EE, PHP has either form-based or MVC with Pear/Smarty. What shoudl I use in Zope? ZTP with Scripts? Or external Methods? ZCLasses? Products?
I use whatever makes my work most effective. Depending on task, different approaches win.... Most of the time, I use ZPT and scripts. But for some tasks, I use External Methods (when I need to access operating system resources), DTML (for JavaScript, CSS, Email, SQL generation), product defined classes (for basic services where efficiency is a prime concern) and ZClasses (prototyping, small isolated applications).
* Releated to the former question: ASP.NET and PHP (through Pear) excell in easy (fast!) form-based development. What functionality can Zope offer? I've seen some references to a " Formulator" product.
I do not know what form-based development is. But, I think, I am very fast with Zope: e.g. SGML/XML content management system with versioning, concurrent update (on separate document components), workflow including checkin/checkout/export/import/delegate, local and global history, delayed cataloging, mass import/export in about 2 months of work. This was for a prototype (without polished presentation but with almost complete infrastructure). Result: we dropped a commercial Content Management System and will build our own based on this prototype.
* Plone seems to be all the rage. But is Plone usable as an application framework? Can I use Plone for form-based, data-driven applications?
You will use only part of the Plone's tools (probably: actions, form controller (Plone's MVC), skins, ...) but not its content classes, membership, registration, ...
* Thanks to Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python programs don't scale well on SMP systems. Which is a "must have" in our situation. I' ve found some references to using ZEO to circumvent this, effectively running multiple instances of Zope on one server. Is there any documentation to be found on this subject?
Search for "ZEO" (e.g. via Google).
And how proven is this solution?
We use it for a set of about 10 portals, tendency rapidly growing.
* And finally (which makes me come across somowhat like a Troll, sorry about that :-). What is the "life expectancy" of Zope? Most of the hype regarding Zope seems to have died away somewhat.
I never heard about "hype regarding Zope". I work with it since 5 years and I continue to be excited. I also worked with J2EE (JSP + Bea Weblogic) and I can say that at least I am at least 5 to 10 times faster with Zope than with J2EE. We currently drop the J2EE application in favour of a Zope based solution. -- Dieter