I work as senior developer/architect for a software development company in The Netherlands which focusses its activitites on web-development with J2EE, DOT.NET and PHP. Development in Zope/Python has never been an option for management because yet another platform would be too much of an investment considering Zope's minimal market share in Holland. Besides, the mindshare of Python at our premises is nill apart from myself. However, recently a customer has shown great interest in Zope (thanks to some slick presentation of Plone) and they are willing to make a signicant investment. I'm now in the rather weird position of having to win the sceptics over to join the Zope fray. To be perfectly honest, I have some lingering doubts and uncertainties. So therefore I would like to pose the following questions regarding development in Zope: * Zope is often criticised for its perceived lack of documentation. Although the current Zope book seems to have improved greatly, I still miss a good reference guide/book on advanded topics (the Development Guide seems to have stuck at version 2.4 and is rather limited). Which book(s) can fullfill this role? * Zope seems to lack a dominant development methodology/paradigm. DOT.NET has got form-based ASP.NET/ADO.NET, Java has MVC with Struts/J2EE, PHP has either form-based or MVC with Pear/Smarty. What shoudl I use in Zope? ZTP with Scripts? Or external Methods? ZCLasses? Products? * Releated to the former question: ASP.NET and PHP (through Pear) excell in easy (fast!) form-based development. What functionality can Zope offer? I've seen some references to a " Formulator" product. * Plone seems to be all the rage. But is Plone usable as an application framework? Can I use Plone for form-based, data-driven applications? * Thanks to Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python programs don't scale well on SMP systems. Which is a "must have" in our situation. I' ve found some references to using ZEO to circumvent this, effectively running multiple instances of Zope on one server. Is there any documentation to be found on this subject? And how proven is this solution? * And finally (which makes me come across somowhat like a Troll, sorry about that :-). What is the "life expectancy" of Zope? Most of the hype regarding Zope seems to have died away somewhat. Recently its coming back in the slipstream of Plone. But realistically, what are the chances of Zope being a *relevant* application platform in a couple of years time? WIth "relevant" I mean: a platform which is well supported and keeps up with the compettition on *features*, not necessarilly market share. Many thanks, Iwan