A client of ours has approached us about designing and building a major web portal project focused around a particular topic area with extensive member services and content management abilities. We now have to spec this project out and at some point in the near future I will have to decide on a WWW server/Application server/Database combination. Zope is in the running, along with WebObjects, NetObjects, ODI's ObjectStore + ObjectForms, etc. My initial impulse is to go with Zope because of its low cost overhead and my expertise with Python as well as the access I have to this mailing list and so on. Unfortunately my desire to do implement python is offset by a few major concerns, and I would like to see if anybody out there could address these questions/concerns: 1) Zope seems to want to operate in a configuration of web server, application server, and object database all in one package. I have managed to get Zope to run using ZServer + Apache PCGI, but the performance seems quite quite dismal. My concern is mainly scalability: I want to be able to use an industry standard web server (i.e. apache) separate from the application server so that I could do things like scale using multiple web servers, etc. etc. 2) The same issue applies to the DB layer. After floating through all the documentation on the zope.org site I am unclear what the relationship would be between Zope and an industrial strength database like Oracle 8, etc. I am wary of using Zope's own object DB because of scale and compatibility issues, but most of the benefits of using Zope would be mitigated if I ended up having to write SQL queries to access my Oracle database. The question is: is it possible to use a DB like Oracle or Postgres, etc. transparently and in the same manner that I would be using Zope's native db? How about an object DB like ODI's ObjectStore? 3) Zope is not "standard" enough that should I get run over by a truck development could proceed without me. Finding consultants and programmers other than myself to work on this project could be difficult. 4) At this moment in time my tendency is to want to sell the client on implementing Apple's WebObjects + Oracle8, but the cost overhead of that choice would limit the amount of revenue available for working on the project. What are other developers experiences with WebObjects, and how would they compare them to Zope? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Ryan