Jens Vagelpohl wrote:
that's an interesting point. i have this ongoing discussion with one of my best friends who does webdesign and web-programming (nothing on a real programming language level like perl or python) for a living. he swears by cold fusion.
now, is zope really what cold fusion wants to be? i have to plead ignorance when it comes to using cold fusion, i never tried it. from what this friend keeps telling me it looks like cold fusion allows you to do the fancy shmancy graphics stuff pretty well with WYSIWIG editors and such. i don't think that's the road zope is going itself, zope as i see it is more about enabling, programming, and basically being the workhorse back-end to those graphics.
Hmm, The parallel is closer between CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) and DTML. ColdFusion does not have an integrated ODB, nor does it have Zope's through-the-web management. CFML has a syntax that is more elegant than the 'old-style' DTML, but is roughly equivalent to the 'new-style' DTML. Allaire has ColdFusion Studio, which is a souped-up version of Allaire Homesite. Studio is probably the best HTML/Server-Side-Programming IDE that I am aware of that is available for Wintel boxen (I love the Codesweeper function). BTW I never use Studios wysiwyg features. It also integrates nicely with Macromedia Dreamweaver, which is the best wysiwyg editor, period. Note: A very close competitor to ColdFusion Studio was Elemental Software's Drumbeat (http://www.drumbeat.com), which unfortunately had gone down an ASP only path that spelled its doom. They were recently acquired by Macromedia, and given Macromedia's history of browser-agnosticism with Dreamweaver, this could lead to a very interesting product, from Zope's POV(a server-agnostic IDE, perhaps based on WebDAV?). Now, none of the preceding should be taken as a criticism of Zope, as two things that Zope has (the integrated ODB and through-the-web management), not to mention cross platform deployment, are category-killer features. Zope's standards-based approach of embracing multiple clients on multiple platforms is far superior to Allaire's proprietary approach of providing an optimized client on a single platfrom, no matter how good it is. Michael Bernstein.