In our department I have decided (as a CTO) to use Zope for an ecommerce application server. And I also would like to use it for another application for a customer. I will have a presentation about Zope and our plans in a 3-day technical conference of our corporation. Can I have some (primarily technical) arguments why Zope is better to some (especially Java-based) specific web application server tool (WebSphere, Oracle Application Server, Oracle8i, NetDynamics, etc)? I'd be very glad if some of you share his thoughts about the topic. NM
Nemeth, I've seen you ask this question a couple times here and as you're getting no response, I figured I'd put my $.02 in despite a marked lack of experience in developing apps in Java. I can therefore only give a 10,000-foot perspective on why using Zope/Python might be a strategic advantage as opposed to using another app server that is built on Java/J2EE. 1. Zope is built on Python. Python is widely considered much easier to learn than Java and I've heard many folks say that building apps in Python takes less time than building apps in Java. 2. Zope and Python are open source software, unlike the combination of, for example, Netscape Application Server and Java. This means that if the company who sells you the app server (in the case of Zope, Digital Creations) bites the dust, you are not left holding the bag on a product that lacks support avenues. Worst-case, you may have to maintain the source yourself. In the case of Zope and Python, however, there is a fairly wide established user base, pretty much guaranteeing that you'll be able to communicate with other folks who've picked up the ball upon the (tragic) demise of the company who publishes the software. Think of it this way: would you like to be a cc:Mail shop right now? 3. For a good Java/NAS slam, go read Philip Greenspun's gracefully-titled "Why the Netscape Application Server Sucks" at http://www.photo.net/wtr/application-servers.html Good luck! Nemeth Miklos wrote:
In our department I have decided (as a CTO) to use Zope for an ecommerce application server. And I also would like to use it for another application for a customer. I will have a presentation about Zope and our plans in a 3-day technical conference of our corporation.
Can I have some (primarily technical) arguments why Zope is better to some (especially Java-based) specific web application server tool (WebSphere, Oracle Application Server, Oracle8i, NetDynamics, etc)?
I'd be very glad if some of you share his thoughts about the topic.
NM
-- Chris McDonough Digital Creations, Inc. Zope - http://www.zope.org
Chris McDonough wrote:
3. For a good Java/NAS slam, go read Philip Greenspun's gracefully-titled "Why the Netscape Application Server Sucks" at http://www.photo.net/wtr/application-servers.html
### What's app server on earth? ### Quoted from Locomotive's site: """ What exactly is an application server anyway? All of a sudden it seems everyone's got one to sell or to share, promising magical scalability, but since it's been so hyped, a solid definition is hard to find. Essentially, an application server is a general purpose software server for writing, testing and executing services. Rather than the old 3-tier architecture composed of clients, a server, and a database back-end, an application server allows an n-tier architecture where the server connects to a database in addition to serving many applications or services to it's clients. A web application server typically communicates with one or more relational databases and a web server to provide a user interface for the client end. Java Report printed a great article called "Application servers: distributed development and deployment made easy," which does a good job laying out requirements for a legitimate application server. According to the article, features an application server should provide include 1. State management for HTTP transactions 2. Pooling of connections to databases 3. Scaling to handle thousands of simultaneous users by use of multithreading 4. Load balancing across multiple machines 5. High availability 6. Management of transactions across multiple distributed systems 7. Secure communications """ Zope achieves 1(with fs/sql session); 2(native); 3, 4, 5(with linux virtual server project, possibly with help of ZEO); 6(mostly with RDBMS); 7(with apache-ssl) And Zope provides more than that: a. an excellent "visible" OO structure b. Acquisition, much better than those primitive "include" and "useBean", though sometime you will go astray in the namespace :> c. generic user management with a lot of authenticating methods ( thanks for those *userfolder products) d. a good security model ### What do we(or just I?) need on earth ? ### A rapid dynamic web site developing/deploying enviroment! The developing speed is the first one to consider. Zope's strength is its OO structure while weakness is that there is no good IDE like JBuilder, especially there is no a good debugger for python or DTML yet. I don't know whether Zope-Mozilla will include this? The real runtime speed is not so important, my standard currently is about 30 dynamic-page requests per sec (coming from the most popular one of my copr's sites, and I haven't test Zope yet. I will test it after 3 weeks after I finish those exams). But there must be some ways to improve the performance when load is higher, and failure tolerance is rather important. I think I can use linux virtual server or eddie to reach these. regards, lenx
participants (3)
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Chris McDonough -
Nemeth Miklos -
Wei Tao