I am involved with Spectra beta testing, I will say this much, there is very little technical documentation for spectra, 150% less than zope... They have a really jazzy website, and some great marketing materials which made us very interested in it, but when it comes to getting something built, it would take us way more time to develope in Spectra than in Zope, PHP3, or ColdFusion. -chris -----Original Message----- From: Jay, Dylan [mailto:djay@lucent.com] Sent: Tuesday, September 28, 1999 7:20 PM To: 'Brian Lloyd'; 'chas'; Zope Mailing List (E-mail) Subject: RE: [Zope] Allaire Spectra

-----Original Message----- From: Brian Lloyd [mailto:Brian@digicool.com] Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 1999 00:03 To: 'chas'; Zope Mailing List (E-mail); 'Jay, Dylan' Subject: RE: [Zope] Allaire Spectra

I think that this is an important thread - while we do not necessarily want to compete with every other product in the marketplace on a feature-by-feature basis, it _is_ important to keep an eye on the competition and to learn from both their successes and failures.

Zopistas with significant experience using other systems are invaluable in this process - you have enough of a foot in both worlds to give informed feedback as to what we can learn from the other guys out there.

The main general points I see above:

o short learning curve, quick tutorials and productivity

o very good docs/organization/presentation

...are things that (believe me) we have been hearing loud and clear for a while now. We (and the Zopista community) have been focusing a lot of effort on HowTos, better documentation and improving zope.org as a learning resource to make progress on these concerns. That doesn't mean that the problem is solved, of course, but the community as a whole is certainly aware of it and taking action.

That said, are there other particular lessons that you think we should learn from CF/Spectra?

I think one big thing you missed was marketing. Have a look at the spectra web-site. It says in very clear terms what it will give you from a buisiness point of view. Zope may have some description of its technical archetecture (which is great for those that want to cut through the BS) but this makes it a lot harder to gleam the the direct benifits of using Zope are. Things like collaborative editing, robustness from intergrated transactions etc. I'm going to give a seminar on Zope to the lucent web community (not a small thing) in a month and this what I'm going to have to do. I realized that rattling of what it is is only half effective, I have to say what it can do for people and then say how. Also, I think a good analysis of the buisness case for using Zope, esp comparing it to what the spectre rhetoric says, will hopefully make clear where Zope is falling down. For all the patting on the back everyone does Zope still has problems. It has fantastic promise and in most areas does a great job, but I think it has a long way to go before it can be said to be way ahead of the competition. Anyway, my point is that we should examine Zope from the point of view of what it offers to non technical people who can't afford to experiment. At the moment my particular headache is ZClasses. Great idea just to complicated and hard to get working. _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope (To receive general Zope announcements, see: http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce For developer-specific issues, zope-dev@zope.org - http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )