Dear Zopers, I went to a presentation by a Vignette technical guy yesterday. Last week I visited Digital Creations where I had a great meeting with Paul and Jim (hi guys). I thought y'all might like to hear my impressions of the similarities and contrasts between the two companies. I'd like to start by thanking the people who gave me some things to look for in the Vignette meeting. It was very helpful. My first impression is that Vignette knows how to sell and DC knows about software engineering. As a developer it was a lot of fun talking to DC about Zope, but it was mostly about underlying technology. Vignette talked (too much, for my taste) about what it does, but not how it does it, but at the end they had managed to show off lots of neat features that make for good bullet points. With DC I ended up with a good idea of what could be done, but not how much of it had been prepackaged. More on this later. Vignette's product is call StoryServer. It appears to me that Zope and StoryServer have essentially the same capabilities. StoryServer appears to be Tcl based (at least the scripting language is Tcl based) whereas Zope is Python. The object oriented nature of Python may make it more powerful, but also, perhap, more confusing at the beginning. The StoryServer scripting seemed rather fragile to me--little happens automatically (see below for a discussion of flushing the cache) or by default. The Zope concept of "acquisition" operates very powerfully. If I had to redo a site I'd rather use Zope. StoryServer has a very clever caching mechanism. They cache componnets in the native filesystem, then let Apache's server-side include mechanism compose the files. (It wasn't clear to me how they manage to track users paths if the user only goes to cached files, so it is possible that they always have some communication overhead--I'm not sure.) The Zope cache is inside the Zserver, so probably a little slower. OTOH, when a Zope object changes it automatically notifies the cache, whereas the StoryServer cache needs to be explicitly flushed. When the cache is not in use StoryServer appears quite slow. Even with the cache they only claimed 1M hits/day using a dual CPU Ultra 2 sparc, which sounds much less than Zope. But I haven't tested either. StoryServer appears to have much more "out-of-the-box" capabilities, though it is not clear to me whether that is only appearance, or reality. For instance, StoryServer has canned tools for workflow, cookie management, detection of browser versions, and user tracking. (Of course, cookies and browser detection are not very difficult.) I'm sure that Zope can handle such tasks, but I don't know if such tools are already written or need to be done from scratch. For instance, I've heard Jim or Paul say that they know how to deal with cookies, but I'm not sure what the capabilities are. Where StoryServer really wins is in the interface. They have a nice, Java powered user interface that provides a point and click method of both writing code, and administering the site. One big example is workflow. StoryServer has a nice system for moving content around, starting with the initial content entry, then through reviews by e.g. marketing, legal, etc., until it is finally published. All of this is configurable and doable though a nice GUI interface. I have confidence that Zope has the capability to perform all these tasks, but expect that is must be programmed from scratch. In any case, there is no fancy GUI for doing this under Zope. Most of the other differences pointed out by Vignette are FUD, but just because it is FUD doesn't mean it isn't true. It would be nice to know of a high volume, high visibility Zope powered site. I'd like to hear any contribution/criticisms to the above. We will be making a decision very soon and more knowledge is always good. Thanks, -- --Michael