This email is partly quest for finding arguments how to sell Zope and to understand how people - and especially people working in corporations IT departments - make any decisions and how could Zope fit into that picture. First a couple of words on my background, to understand my views. I've doing web development with different tools from 1996. Done little C and Perl, instantly adopted php when I saw it, got bored with Java when tried it years ago and everything was still a mess -- meaning you had to do everything yourself, fell in love with Zope. I have never built big corporate IT-systems or even managed one, my IT experience comes from applications that are either used through the web or talk with other applications with TCP/IP. I'm not a programmer - I'm just interested in solving problems. And now to the beef. Lately I've been reading some J2EE documents and tutorials and wondered about the promises that they give. Somehow it seems that there are answers or promises to almost anything, whatever you would like to do - there is answer of somekind available. Application services and frameworks are available on OpenSource flavour - or from IBM, Sun, Orcale and others. And people have really eaten the J2EE candy. Bookstores are filled with J2EE books and persons doing J2EE design work are paid pretty well by tech. companies like Accenture. Java and XML can be stated to be 'industry standard' - even in popular magazines. Microsoft architechtures seems also quite popular. My impression is that to many doing development on MS platform is a must because of the easy connection to office systems that also run on MS-tools. I once saw a nice web content management software that had a really nice tools into Word and also to desktop. Managing web content was as easy as writing stuff in Word. In this way I can easily understand those who have made 'safe' decisions on Java or MS way, either on choosing their platform or by buying products on that platform. Then again neither J2EE, Java webservices or ms-way of work haven't really felt good to me. Zope did touch some nerves and after a time it started to make sense. And after laerning a bit of Python Zope made more sense. It is not answer to everything, but doing rapid web development is really fun and fast with Zope. With Zope and Python I now know that I can do almost any webservice that our client can imagine, but on the other hand I also know that the same service could be done with any other development tool too. For a customer the Java platform seems secure. They have read about Java and know it as a term. They have an idea that if they buy Java, they can later on also find someone else who can continue the work done now and that way they would make a secured investment. They might have also something else allready running on Java-platform or are going to have, and don't want something to mix -- either because of it might cause more maintenance costs and / or they don't want to learn too many different things to handle. Same goes to MS platform, except that the products and solutions that they buy will be most likely a closed boxes that they need to trust (of course Java solutions can be that too). If we forget the price discussions, what are the arguments for choosing something else than 'industry standard'? How to make sure to a client, that their investment is secured and they have made a good selection for their web services. -- Heimo Laukkanen Oy Fountain Park Ltd Hämeentie 153 B, 00560 Helsinki, Finland tel. +358 9 777 68 161, gsm +358 40 759 1110, fax +358 9 777 68 100 http://www.fountainpark.org