[Zope-CMF] what lies in store for us if we choose Zope/CMF?

[Chris McDonough]

> The downside of Zope seems to be its learning curve:
> although it's allegedly easy to start off with Zope,
> several things I've read have indicated that the curve
> slopes gently at first and gets much steeper later on.

This is true.

> It's a little challenging to figure out exactly what
> that means.

It means that it's simple to get started doing simple things (and even
some not-so-simple things), but lots of people experience a point where
what they've created using Zope needs to be deconstructed and rewritten
in a different way to make it "maintainable".

> My questions then:
> --Basically, I don't know what lies in store for us if
> we choose Zope/CMF: when does the learning curve get
> steep and how steep are we talking? I mean is it that
> getting the basic site up takes a day, but then when
> you want to use the clustering features it'll take you
> 3 weeks to get them right?

Bad example because clustering features are quite easy to set up (ZEO). 
The bigger problem is that it's tempting to quickly write "through the
web" code in "skins" and/or "instance space" that, though it does what
you need at the moment, becomes quite difficult to understand for people
just coming on to your project.  It's easy to forget where you put
stuff, what you "customized" (a skins term), and in general how it all
works.  This is the case with any programming tool of course, but is
exacerbated in Zope by the fact that if you "drink the kool aid" of
"through the web" programming (using the Zope Management Interface
through a browser to create code), all of your code gets stored in
Zope's ZODB.  ZODB is a wonderful thing, but it can be difficult (if not
impossible for some) to do things with code stored in ZODB like
versioning, editing with a normal text editor, deployment, etc. that it
is relatively simple to do when your code is on the filesystem.

See http://www.plope.com/zope_collab for more of my opinion on the
matter.

> --Can anyone direct me to a case-study anywhere on the
> net (or if you have one of your own :) ) that would
> step me through the easy and hard parts of a Zope/CMF
> deployment? 

No, I can't at least.

> --Also, can anyone suggest some Zope/CMF equivalents
> (if they even exist) in other languages such as PHP
> and Java? Would Midgard in PHP be akin to Zope/CMF?

Well, I think it might be more apt to say that the funcionality provided
by the combination of PHP, Midgard, and MySQL is closer to what Zope
gives you.  Not sure about a Java comparison.