Thanks for responding, even though it was an incorrect mailing list. Fantastic answers! Just in your message, sounds like I'll give Zope a try. I hope the learning curve for Python isn't very steep. Very impressed with the features and even more so with the support (i.e. mailinglist) and documentation! Again, my thanks! -----Original Message----- From: Lennart Regebro [mailto:regebro@nuxeo.com] Sent: Monday, December 08, 2003 10:18 AM To: Aaron Paxson Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] Newbie Question Aaron Paxson wrote:

I'm currently learning Java, and was starting to learn the RedHat Web Application Framework. I've found Zope in an article on the web, and started to look into it. It looks to be just as scalable, but I'm curious on how extensible it is, as well as, it's power in a corporate environment.

Infinitely scalable really. Zope is no more power hungry than any other dynamic web environment. Zope corp has made really big installations with silly amounts of load.

For example, how extensible is it, to modify the security module and have it authenticate against LDAP?

There is an excellent LDAPUserFolder for this, ready for use.

Also, how powerful is Python as compared to Java?

About the same. Python has some nice things, Java has some nice things. One cool thing about Python is that it is very dynamic, which makes some things extremely easy. The drawback is that since it's all runtime, and no compilation at all, it has no compile/time type checking. But this is easy to get used to.

it uses a native compiler, it stands to reason that it would be faster than Java,

Uhm. No, it uses a bytecode compiler, just like Java. Java's is sligthly better optimized and therefore faster, although not significantly so in this case. Pythons bytecode compilr is "just-in-time" however, so you never need to compile anything, you just run it. This in combination with the above dynamicism gives cool development features like automatic refresh of the Products. You change the code, and refresh the webpage, and your code is automatically recompiled, the old code thrown out and the new one sucked in. And you don't need to make one single compile command. This, together with Pythons clear and explicit structure and Zopes OODB storage makes development times very low.

but what of it's objects and packages? (i.e. Does it have an image manipulation package, or networking packages?)

Yes, and yes. The only package I am missing for Python is a platform independent MIDI-package.

For those who want a couple of examples, I have 3 projects for our intranet/extranet/internet applications:

1). Images and cataloging (where, our development team can upload their images, and the intranet application will take that image and export it to a JPG to update the web catalog, and move the original file to our FTP site for our photographers.

Not a problem.

2). Document Management (Uploading of files, and inputting data to index on those files for searching)

Easy with CMS products that are available like CPS and Plone, and maybe the others too.

3). Obviously the usual (Content Management and Portals) which I'm sure Zope does a good job at.

Yup. :)

Thanks in advance!! Again, my apologies if there is a better list for this post.

Yeah, zope@zope.org is better, so I answer there instead of to zope-dev. //Lennart