Hi folks, We're in the process of evaluating Zope and Cold Fusion. I'm the resident Open Source advocate <g>, so I'd like to make sure that Zope has all its benefits given its due. We're, (well actually Alan is), working on a contract where the client requested Cold Fusion so he has some direct experience. We installed Principia back in December and actually are testing it for another client, but haven't spent much time with it unfortunately. Alan has brought up some usage concerns of his and I hope someone on the list could respond. Please don't think that Alan is against the product; no in fact he is very interested in it but is just unsure of the tools available to help do good work. ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- Date sent: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:08:00 -0500 To: TomJenkins@zentuit.com From: Alan Johnston <flames direct to me, please [g]> Subject: Zope musings I don't know why I didn't think of this before. As you can tell from earlier comments, I like Cold Fusion studio, the IDE which allows you to control web page, database, query, and site management all in one window. It is a very slick way to create web pages in general, whether or not they include CF tags and CF queries. But there's no reason you couldn't also use CF Studio to develop Zope/DTML pages. You would have to save your pages on a local drive and use Zope's Upload feature to publish them. But that's a fairly small price in inconvenience. Anyway, the lack of a nice, user-friendly interface for web page creation is the one klunky thing about Zope (Principia) at our site. Typing angle brackets and obscure HTML tags into your browser is a fun way to astound and impress your non-HTML-literate friends, but I wouldn't have wanted to make a Georgetown/CASS questionnaire system that way. And, again, trying to use Netscape Composer, as recommended in the Principia docs is a sub-par solution. So this is really the one (only?) area I've seen so far where CF is way ahead Zope. So if we want to use Zope for real-world tasks, one important need in the near term is to find a better way to do actual web page/HTML design and link that to Zope's cool, object-database approach to Web site management and its apparent (we haven't tried it yet ... I'm going on the testimonials here) speed and technical superiority in database queries and interfaces. (CF uses ODBC ... ugh.) Ironically, using CF Studio would seem to be a good way to make that link. I wonder if there are other (free/cheap) HTML editor/site managers out there? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Tom Jenkins DevIS Linux & Samba 2.0 : The best Windows file server http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,2196106,00.html "Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." Romans 12:21