On Wed, 15 Dec 2004 15:40:11 -0800, seberino@spawar.navy.mil <seberino@spawar.navy.mil> wrote:

I don't know much about web stuff.

I can see amazing power in Zope and thought PHP was just for quick and easy little projects.

However, I keep hearing about more and more big beefy web projects and companies using PHP.

Without starting a flame war, is there a chance in future the power AND ease of PHP may win out over Zope? Does Zope's architecture have some killer features that PHP can never copy?

It seems Zope's steep learning curve is a showstopper for some.

Please advise.

Chris

As a professional PHP developer you'd think I'd choose PHP, but no. I'd go for Zope for anything complex. Why? I'll explain ;) For quick-and-dirty database to webpage things, PHP wins out every time. Anything that involves basic processing work I'd go to PHP as well. But for anything complex, or if I'm starting from scratch data-storage-wise I'd choose Zope. Basically, despite all PHP's libraries, you start from scratch with PHP. If you want to present friendly URLs to fetch objects (which in PHP would then grab stuff from the DB) like /staff/managerial/joe_bloggs you'd need to either create a whole directory structure for each person, or you'd need to use mod_rewrite to a script and process it with PHP to get what you need, then you'd have to fetch the data and display it. In Zope you create the object in the right place, and you're done! You could create a 'StaffMember' product and define the behaviour and data there and it'd be stored, right there, in Zope. If you need to search, use a ZCatalog. SQL is handy though, and ZSQL can be used for that, but in a similar way. I've only just started on Zope development, but in PHP you always seem to be reinventing the wheel, so to speak. I've made several backends for my website, and none have been finished. Though my current Zope site isn't finished, it's mostly working, and with nowhere near the effort of the PHP sites. I'm sold :) -- Phillip Hutchings http://www.sitharus.com/ sitharus@gmail.com / sitharus@sitharus.com