We recently switched from ColdFusion to Zope. Both products had to be usable not only by IT people, but by technically literate business users. This is a business perspective with a technical bent...-:) Here are some of the pros and cons of each... ColdFusion Pros Documentation Query Building IDE (Nick Bradbury's Homesite>>>ColdFusion Studio) and ColdFusion-Dreamweaver roundtrip Training availability History Cons ColdFusion Application Server is good, not great, requires another server and more then average monitoring. Productivity. Despite 1000's of custom tags, ColdFusion requires excessive coding to build basic data driven sites (One example would be the Fusbox calendar example. It consists of 5 pages of code, much of it complex and requires reworking if one wants to use it elsewhere for a different purpose within the same site. Offers less functionality then either the Calendar Tag or the Event Calendar.) Language: If you want custom programming, you will need MSVC++ Zope Pros Data driven from the get go. Can be used (on an Intranet) without IIs or Apache. (Some have said that Apache is faster. So far, in our use, which is real world as opposed to benchmarks, the difference is neglible and Zope is just as fast as the ColdFusion/Apache setup.) Productivity. No other tool on the market, commercial or open source, can compare with Zope...when it comes to building a functional data driven web site that can be maintained by technically literate users with a minimum knowledge of html and web technologies. (The above statement needs to read carefully. I base the statement on tests performed with a handful of users with absolutely no web experience.) Products: Products such as Squishdot are invaluable in corporate Intranet. The abililty to resuse the same product within the same site.. over and over again cannot be underestimated. Community: this list provides better support at no cost, then most commercial companies who charge outrageous fees. (One 12 minute call to MS about Exchange server cost $265 bucks) Community contributions and DC contributions to the source and bug fixes are quicker and in some ways, superior to the equivalent fixes provided by the majority of commercial software companies. (That includes Allarie and Macromedia) Security: Excellent out of the box security. Language. Python. It is a truly beautiful language, well documented, and training is readily available. In the hands of good programmer, there is no telling what could be developed with Python/Zope. Note: during our research, there were Python programmers who felt Zope was bad for Python and Zopista's who felt Python was bad for Zope. Go figure. Ease of use (don't laugh). Basic site building with Zope is extremely easy. Aquistion. It works, just don't ask me to explain it. Cons Documentation: Getting better but you won't find the 4 book documentation you get with ColdFusion Not enough benchmarks or test stats. (If you research a lot of products or Zope literature, you can start to get a little jumpy after reading "not for production, developement only, beta beta beta...this has an extremely negative effect on management) Ease of use [expletive deleted] Go above the basics and the learning curve is somewhat steep... ____________________________________________________________________________ __ If your graphics people are just doing graphics and not doing graphics/datadriven stuff ala Ultradev, then they can still use DW to design although they will not be able to the roundtrip stuff.