[Zope-CMF] RE: Re: [Zope] A Tale from IBM land...

[Chris McDonough]

This is an excellent article... I always stood a little in awe of
Microsoft of their committment to making it easy to switch to their
products... excel with the 123 keybindings, Word with the WordPerfect
mode, NT with Services for NetWare, etc.  I think that many people
underestimate how thankless a task it really is to write this kind of
real-world glue code.  Microsoft pretends that it's easy to switch to
their product without completely committing to it, and sometimes it's
even true.  Few OSS solutions offer these kinds of features.

To start using Zope, you need to chew off quite a bit... 1) through the
web everything, 2) object orientation, 3) DTML, and 4) Python.  Oh and
by the way if all you want to do is take an existing CGI and run it
under Zope (for whatever reason).. well.. sorry.

Fortunately it's a compelling mix of technologies, so this isn't
unreasonable given its benefits.  It serves an audience for whom biting
off all the above is more palatable than sticking with their current way
of doing things.  It's pretty amazing what a large audience this really
is, given the amount of pain required to swallow Zope.  It's likely that
the Zope users of the future -- the people slogging through huge reams
of bad, quickly written Perl, PHP, and ASP code right now -- don't know
anything about any of the four things you need to chew off to use Zope,
but they'll still convert because it's better than staying in the hell
they're in.

It'd be great to give these folks a way to move back and forth between
Zope and their current solution.  I'm really happy for folks who attempt
to marry Zope to existing technologies... the people who use it to
manage PHP code, for example.... or ActiveState with Zope-perl.  These
are useful, practical things.  People have a rough time idealogically
with both of them, but they serve a very practical purpose, which is to
allow folks to be able to transition to Zope in bite-sized pieces.  It'd
be nice to understand what would be necessary to provide this same glue
for Vignette solutions.

- C


Jon Edwards wrote:
> 
> How about some docs (or even utilities) on how to convert from
> Broadvision/Vignette/Microsoft CMS to Zope "in 5 easy steps"?
> 
> ...and back again! According to this
> article -http://www.joelonsoftware.com/stories/storyReader$122 - you need to
> provide a simple entry AND exit-strategy for potential customers. Knowing
> that they're not going to be "locked-in" is very reassuring, and makes it
> more likely they will try Zope out.
> 
> Well, it made sense to me, YMMV :-)
> 
> Cheers, Jon
> 
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