Hello everyone, I've been lurking for the past week or so and have read a sizeable chunk of the archives of the mailing list. I should explain that I've got a fair background in Web development (Perl CGI and related stuff, Microsoft ASP/MTS/COM and various J2EE tools), and a reasonable background in Python as well. At the moment, I'm trying to get my head around how the various bits of Zope hang together, and put together a personal list of which bits of Zope to focus on now and which bits to leave till later. Reading through a huge pile of messages, I've formed the following impressions: - ZPT is viewed as "the way of the future". I like the separation between content and presentation aspect, I like the fact that I can use Dreamweaver to create and edit templates, overall I like the concept of ZPT a lot - while DTML isn't going to go away any time soon, there seems to be at least a mindshift away from it at present. Same for ZClasses - consensus seems to be that page rendering using ZPT & TAL is a bit slower than using DTML. This is obviously a generalisation, but appears to be a consistent theme of the messages from several people. I haven't yet seen anything like "it's 30% slower" or "it's 80% slower" yet - there's lots of support for implementing business logic in external Python scripts vs. any other standard Zope options - most people seem to be using Zope for content management sites, as distinct from e.g. e-commerce, app hosting. To me, Zope looks like it should be particularly good for app hosting as it has version control, user-level security and state management out of the box, but I can't recall reading a message from anyone using it for that Here's what I'm struggling to find: - any structured info on using Python to access Zope's internals. I've found lots of code snippets to perform specific tasks (e.g. create a folder), but so far nothing like a "cookbook". Something broadly equivalent to the "DTML to ZPT" page at www.zopelabs.com, or the "METAL for beginners" and "ZPT simple tutorial" pages at www.zope.org, would be great - anything on hosting Java applets or Active/X controls using Zope. Given the amount of non-Zope sites that use this stuff, I'd be very surprised if there's no Zope sites doing the same, but I can't find any info at all - info on relational database performance issues such as connection pooling between sessions. There's a body of (non-Zope) information on how to design efficient database-driven Web sites available on the Net, but I can't find any info on how to implement these designs using Zope - info on why creating a Zope Product, as distinct from a bunch of folders, scripts, templates, etc., is A Good Thing. I suspect I'm missing something obvious here... Can anyone provide pointers to the above info, if it exists? Thanks in advance David Mitchell