Steven Grimes wrote:
I've been asked by my superiors to justify using Zope for our web database applications from a performance perspective. I've searched the web and tried to search the Zope site for any relevant performance benchmarks comparing Zope to languages such as ASP, PHP and JSP. Has anyone done any real world benchmarks?
Sigh. Unfortunately, there is almost no chance that Zope will compare favorably to any of the options that you've mentioned *purely from a performance standpoint*. This is because DTML needs to be evaluated, and the engine that's doing the evaluating is itself written in an interpreted language (Python). Whereas the interpreting engines that you've mentioned are written in compiled languages, or in the case of JSP a bytecode compiled language (somebody is certain to correct me on this if I'm wrong). However, Zope is more than fast enough, so your superiors are actually asking the wrong question. The thing is, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to buy extra hardware than it is to pay more people, and in my opinion, Zope is a huge productivity enhancer when it comes to building web-applications. Time to market is reduced, because so much has already been built for you (user management, security system, etc.), so you don't have to reinvent the wheel (or Access Control Lists) for your application. The same goes for XML-RPC, WebDAV, LDAP, etc. Buying more hardware is cheaper than buying more programmers, and scales much better too (ever tried adding people to a late project?). With Zope, I can build (for example) a fairly sophisticated Intranet for a company in a couple of days, without breaking into a sweat. This Intranet will include personal folders for the users, a bug/ticket tracker, industry news, departmental pages, and any of a dozen other goodies like discussion forums and a collaborative documentation system. Then I can refine it over another couple of days. By any sane measure, this is far more cost effective for a company than paying two or more programmers to build something equivalent in a couple of months, just to save a grand on hardware. HTH, Michael Bernstein.