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

[Ausum Studio]

Zope is a true ODB-based application server, and though this is one of its
greatest value-provider features, in fact many people will find this
annoying at the time you develop in a multi-programmers environment. There's
so much PHP/MySQL in OS out there and so many people learning it and writing
stuff for it that you probably won't like to complicate them with a whole
new world to understand.

In my experience, Zope is a bliss to use when you're in the need to create
complex specialized applications from scratch, because its object model will
allow you to plan your app in more friendly ways than those table-focused
relational databases. For this matter Zope will provide you the ability to
do "scale models" of your future app, using Zclasses, which then you could
turn into hard-coded products with no problem.

The learning curve is steep because of the many available ways to do the
same things, due to the languages available and the many ways you can use
them. For example, you can write an app using just ZPT and PythonScripts.
But you can also use external scripts written in regular Python; you can
write whole products in Python as well; and even you can use the humble and
powerful DTML.  As many languages use to lead to the same number of
development environments, you can make your mind on where the steepness
reside. It's not a problem of how difficult things are, but how many tools
are there for you and how to choose the right one for a given particular
task/routine.

Finally you should take into account that the database, ZODB, is an
always-append one. This means that if you are planning to use Zope for
things like forums, expect to deal with the increasing size of it, as every
object, even deleted ones, will live there until you perform a prune. You
don't have this problem in RDBs, and though in this case you can always use
one in Zope (it supports connections with more than one data source),  why
would you want to do that? Why would you want to learn Zope if you're going
to use SQL?

The good news is that Zope delivers what it promises. Maintainability  seems
to be a problem in some cases - we've all seen that when Zope.org got
upgraded - , but, like in any other technology, it can be sorted out with
expertise and in-extense planning, prior to starting to code.


Ausum





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Francis Kelly" <cmsenquiry at yahoo.com>
To: <zope-cmf at zope.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 2:04 PM
Subject: [Zope-CMF] what lies in store for us if we choose Zope/CMF?


> We are in the process of building a web-site
> automation tool that will allow users to go to our
> site and create their own website that will be hosted
> on our server. In addition to a bunch of static HTML
> pages, their site will be able to include management
> of mailing lists, some calendaring function, probably
> a discussion forum.
>
> So, we're looking at using a CMS for administering all
> of these small sites.
>
> Zope/CMF (maybe using Plone as well) seems like a
> pretty good option. I've read quite a bit about the
> advantages of Zope/CMF to be very intrigued.
>
> 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.
>
>
> It's a little challenging to figure out exactly what
> that means.
>
> 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?
>
> --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?
>
> --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?
>
> Thank you very much for your help.
>
> Francis
>
>
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