-----Original Message----- From: Ben White [mailto:ben@platform.net] Sent: Monday, November 22, 1999 1:27 AM To: zope@zope.org Subject: [Zope] ZOPE VS. PHP, VIGNETTE ETC.
Hi,
I am new to Zope -- really excited about it -- but have a few basic questions (which I'm sure have been asked before).
1. HOW WELL DOES ZOPE SCALE? Is anybody out there using this for high traffic sites? We have been using a custom blend of PHP and Mysql for a busy site and it works pretty well (although MySQL seems to choke when we get really slammed). How well does Zope scale?
Zope scales to multiple arrays of servers with ZEO, which is a commercial addon. Without ZEO, you can get really good performance on one box, but you will hit a celing if your hardware can't handle it (This would happen with any platform). ZEO lets you connect multiple Zopes to the same object storage, so multiple processes on multiple machines can all access the same content.
2. HOW FAST IS ZOPE? VS PHP? And how does it compare to the PHP/MySQL combo? Are their any benchmarks available? It seems pretty quick but I'm not sure what type of transactions are going on below the surface of the pages I'm looking at.
This is kindof an apples and oranges thing. PHP is probably faster for simple logic, but PHP does not provide nearly as much infrastructure (acquisition, full blown security system, XML object, Catalog, full text indexing, implicit transactional support, ORB style object publishing, FTP, XML-RPC, WebDAV etc...) as Zope does. PHP is just a language, not an application platform.
3. HOW WELL DOES ZOPE WORK WITH MYSQL? We have built some pretty serious backend with PHP and MySQL and I'd love to be able to keep our database structure etc.
Just fine. Note that MySQL does not support transactions. You must be very careful about that.
4. HAS ANYBODY COMPARED ZOPE WITH VIGNETTE? Some of our big clients have considered using Vignette. Seems Zope has largely the same mission -- albeit with a lot of catch up to do. Has anybody made a similiar comparison -- and if so do you have any info or ideas to share?
I don't think anyone has made a hard comparison, but we have stolen a few customers from Vignette. it sort of comes down to, who do you trust, us or them? Do you trust someone who gives you all the source code *and* has a community that helps you for free, or do you trust someone who will charge you thousands for a proprietary, close source system and you pay by the hour for support. As someone coming from PHP and MySQL, you should clearly understand the benefits Zope provides overy anything commercial.
4. MIGRATING What is the best way to migrate from a traditional web structure to Zope? For instance do you have to rebuild and register all of your objects with Zope through the web interface? Or can you upload files and have them be recognized by Zope?
You can upload content into Zope with HTTP, FTP, XML-RPC, and WebDAV. Content can also be loaded directly off the filesystem with an import script. -Michel