Geoff Caplan wrote:
To be frank, when you get up close most application servers just don't cut it. ColdFusion, for example, seems to have some serious reliability problems. Until I spotted Zope, I was pretty much resigned to a belt-and-braces solution with Perl/Velocigen or Tcl/AolServer. Not an easy route, but at least it would be reliable.
Understood.
Compared to raw coding, a Python/Zope/Apache/Solid solution looks attractive, to say the least. But at this relatively early stage in its development, can Zope truly deliver?
Just a quick correction, though -- chances are that Zope is older than Tcl/Aolserver, and probably older than the Perl binding to Velocigen. Zope is the unholy union of three former pieces of software: 1) Bobo, the Python Object Publisher. A free pieces of software, first used in a commercial setting in 1996. 2) Principia, Digital Creation's commercial appserver upsell from Bobo. First used in a commercial setting in May 1997. 3) Aqueduct, relational database integration with Bobo/Principia. First used in a commercial setting in Jan 1997. The project that drove Principia's development was a online classified ad system for newspapers. By the time our involvement with the product finished in 1998, it was serving 100 papers, over a million hits a day, and over a million ads a week. The death march on that project taught us a *whole* lot about scale and reliability. The Zope2 *architecture* represents the fulfilled vision of those goals. (Zope2 itself went out missing some of the extras, like spreading your object database storage across multiple files.)
So a plea to you folks who are actually using Zope 2 in a production setting - is it fast enough and stable enough for us to (literally) bet our house on? It will be running unattended on a remote server (probably Linux). We are planning a niche storefront site which will probably get modest traffic of around 50,000 hits a day with around 3,000 products in the database.
Oh its definately fast enough, unless all 50k hits happen in the same minute. :^) Seriously, Zope should do over ten hits per second for even complicated pages, over 30 hits per second for less complicated pages. One programming note: within the next month we'll check in the work for FastCGI, meaning you can sit behind Apache and not pay the fork tax.
Zope is obviously a great product, and most people on this list will be evangelists. But I really would appreciate your objective views. If you prefer privacy, please contact me direct: geoff@productivity.co.uk.
Oh, you wanted *objective* views. :^) --Paul