To the folks on the Zope@zope.org mailing list... I've been trying out Zope on CodeIt's free 2 week trial and my trial is about over. I have no experience with Zope prior to this trial account. I went through the Zope Content Manager's tutorials and have tried to research it thoroughly. We are starting a new web application project and are looking for a stable, scalable platform that will be around and popular/supported for a long time. However, my business partner has brought up some really good questions about our becoming Zope-centric. These are questions that I don't have answers for and was hoping that some of you might be able to answer. 1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's? 2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes down? 3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at once? Can users access the applications reliably, repeatedly? As our 2 week free trial is coming to an end, we need to make a decision about whether to stick with Zope or go with a more universally accepted technology. If you would, please let me know what you think about these issues. Thanks!! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
Green things, On Wed, 01 Mar 2000, you wrote:
To the folks on the Zope@zope.org mailing list...
I've been trying out Zope on CodeIt's free 2 week trial and my trial is about over. I have no experience with Zope prior to this trial account. I went through the Zope Content Manager's tutorials and have tried to research it thoroughly.
Don't know anything about 'CodeIt', but since ZOPE is free, why not just install it locally and keep tinkering?
We are starting a new web application project and are looking for a stable, scalable platform that will be around and popular/supported for a long time. However, my business partner has brought up some really good questions about our becoming Zope-centric. These are questions that I don't have answers for and was hoping that some of you might be able to answer.
Ah... a sensible man... ask question FIRST. (o8
1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's?
ZOPE is pretty much intended to replace Perl and CGI, or act as a CGI program to a web server. If you want to keep your existing CGIs, use a front end server (like Apache [see numerous HOWTOs for details] :), and they can live together reasonably harmoniously.
2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes down?
If you mean "how can we back up our ZOPE site?", then either mirroring via the FTP access to the DB, or periodic exports of your site should suffice. If you mean "how can our site continue running if ZOPE dies?", if you utilise a sepereate server as a front end, all your static content would do well to be hosted there anyway, for performance.
3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at once? Can users access the applications reliably, repeatedly?
From reading this list, it seems there are some people using ZOPE in very high traffic areas. And, of course, if you have your static content being served by a regular server, that alleviates even more load from it.
As our 2 week free trial is coming to an end, we need to make a decision about whether to stick with Zope or go with a more universally accepted technology. If you would, please let me know what you think about these issues.
Remember, there are really two major parts to ZOPE: The object database/renderer, and the ZServer. It is possible to run ZOPE without the ZServer, directly from Apache or similar, as a CGI program. I believe all I have said is accurate, but I do not profess to be a ZOPE expert. If anyone cares to correct me, feel free. (like you wouldn't anyway! :)
Thanks!! __________________________________________________
-- Have a better one, Curtis. <dtml-var standard_work_disclaimer>
Remember, there are really two major parts to ZOPE: The object database/renderer, and the ZServer. It is possible to run ZOPE without the ZServer, directly from Apache or similar, as a CGI program.
can we really run apache without running zserver? i've been running apache as the frontend, and uses pcgi, but i still run zserver. if what you say is true, then maybe i'm doing something wrong. how can i run apache without zserver? tia - ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.kedai.com.my/kk Am I Evil?
On Thu, 02 Mar 2000, you wrote:
Remember, there are really two major parts to ZOPE: The object database/renderer, and the ZServer. It is possible to run ZOPE without the ZServer, directly from Apache or similar, as a CGI program.
can we really run apache without running zserver? i've been running apache as the frontend, and uses pcgi, but i still run zserver. if what you say is true, then maybe i'm doing something wrong.
how can i run apache without zserver?
I believe i mentioned that everything in my email was from my questionable understanding of ZOPE. However, since nobody else has said "erm.. no, that's not correct" i'm led to believe my assumtptions were correct. (o8 Personally, I've only used ZOPE directly with ZServer, or via an Apache server with proxying (i don't count my as yet abortive attemts with apache and fastCGI :)
From a review of my original assumptions (and actually looking further) i may have been totally incorrect, believing the Zope.cgi might be a program you could simply drop into your CGI directory, and presto.
But from closer examination, and some testing, I don't belive this is true.
tia - ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.kedai.com.my/kk Am I Evil?
sorry if i got your hopes up. -- Have a better one, Curtis. <dtml-var standard_work_disclaimer>
You still need ZServer, I think this person meant that ZServer wasn't actually listening on any outside ports, just the local domain socket to Apache. FYI, Zope used to be able to run without ZServer, but it was single threaded. You can still do that now (I imagine) but if you want concurency you need ZServer. -Michel - wrote:
Remember, there are really two major parts to ZOPE: The object database/renderer, and the ZServer. It is possible to run ZOPE without the ZServer, directly from Apache or similar, as a CGI program.
can we really run apache without running zserver? i've been running apache as the frontend, and uses pcgi, but i still run zserver. if what you say is true, then maybe i'm doing something wrong.
how can i run apache without zserver?
tia - ------------------------------------------------------ http://www.kedai.com.my/kk Am I Evil?
_______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
Hi Eric, I just went through this process with my company so I will try to answer your questions. 1) Digital Creations does offer support. There is also, as you can tell, tons and tons of support through lists and websites. You might be able to buy M$ support for $250 an hour but will you get the right answer back in 10 minutes via email? The Zope community is growing very rapidly (take a look at the amount of job posting for Zope and Python people) and as that happens user and community support will get even better. 1.1) One way to do this is to "Zope" part of your site and leave the rest as Apache with all your Perl goodies. I will warn you that once you discover the Zen of Zope you will drop Perl like a bad habit. 2) There are tons of ways to back up Zope. Since the data is stored in one file you can back up that file or you can back up the products and methods you are writing by exporting them. In the end, Zope is just an application with data and can be backed up as such (tape, tar, ftp, etc). 3) This depends on hardware (When I started I asked this question A LOT!). Zope.org serves around 13,000 hits an hour (over 2,000,000 a month) off of a 450 MHz Pentium. I have been building my site on 300 MHz Pentium with 256 MB Ram and it flies (about 3 to 4 times faster than our NT + ASP hosted machine). Apache + Raw HTML will always be faster but Zope really is naturally fast and can be boosted by putting a small amount of hardware behind it. After running a few test I figure I can handle about 10-30 page accesses a second on my current hardware. This is running Zope as a standalone server (very fast) with a database in the back. 3.1) Zope installed on Linux is very reliable. I have been developing a large amount of Zope Web Applications all with PostGreSQL backend and have never brought down Zope or the machine. I do, however continue to try! :) Hope that helps... JMA
We are starting a new web application project and are looking for a stable, scalable platform that will be around and popular/supported for a long time. However, my business partner has brought up some really good questions about our becoming Zope-centric. These are questions that I don't have answers for and was hoping that some of you might be able to answer.
1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's?
2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes down?
3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at once? Can users access the applications reliably, repeatedly?
As our 2 week free trial is coming to an end, we need to make a decision about whether to stick with Zope or go with a more universally accepted technology. If you would, please let me know what you think about these issues.
Thanks!! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Talk to your friends online with Yahoo! Messenger. http://im.yahoo.com
_______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
----- Original Message ----- From: "Eric Walstad" <ewalstad@yahoo.com> To: "Zope@ zope.org" <Zope@zope.org> Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 6:33 PM Subject: [Zope] Should I go with Zope?
I've been trying out Zope on CodeIt's free 2 week trial and my trial is about over. I have no experience with Zope prior to this trial account. I went through the Zope Content Manager's tutorials and have tried to research it thoroughly.
Don't forget that you can also download Zope and try it out easily. I'm running it on Win32 for some development tasks, and it did not take much effort at all to install it and run it locally. So, if you want to continue playing you can always do that.
We are starting a new web application project and are looking for a stable, scalable platform that will be around and popular/supported for a long time.
In terms of popularity and being supported for a long time, I do believe that DC has been quite successful in their consulting business, so they'll be around. And, Zope itself is open source, so there will always be avenues available for using it.
1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's?
IMHO, you'll be quite happy wiht what you can do when you migrate those apps to Zope. In the meantime, though, you can continue using them by setting up Apache with rewrite rules that allow you to access those CGIs still. Without knowing anything about your app, it's difficult to state how you would "interface" with them. There are avenues for doing so. A pretty straightforward one might be XML-RPC. (Your perl CGIs could access Zope data via XML-RPC.)
2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes down?
I think Zope is pretty stable (and I think most regular users of it would agree). It's not generally more likely to die than your system itself. If you do "low-level" development on a different machine, your database should be OK. Plus, all you need to do is back up your Data.fs file. If something got really messed up, you just drop in the back up file. I think the answer to "what if Zope goes down" is really the same kind of thing as "what if the server goes down?" or "what if the drive crashes?" If you really want, there is a Zope product that will mirror your site in HTML (and others have used wget to mirror the site in HTML). But, I think it's better to just maintain a solid Zope, because your site quickly goes from being a static HTML thing to being a dynamically produced, interactive thing which can't be reasonably represented by HTML.
3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at once? Can users access the applications reliably, repeatedly?
People on this list have done benchmarks using ab and other tools. I think the general consensus was that with a moderate machine and a moderately dynamic app you can do a million hits+ per day. Through more machine at it, or go for ZEO (which lets you mirror the object database on multiple machines) and you can handle lots and lots of traffic. Our site (Byproducts.com) has been running on Zope since last May. I've had very little downtime and I don't think I would blame any of it on Zope. Kevin
participants (6)
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Curtis Maloney -
Eric Walstad -
J. Atwood -
Kevin Dangoor -
Michel Pelletier