[Zope] About It..

[Luciano Ramalho]

At 10:12 12/08/99 +0100, Pedro Morais wrote:
>I need to use Zope i a project tht includes also the web server Apache, the
>db MySql and PHP3. But I can't figure out wath to do with Zope. Wath is the
>purpose of Zope, did I have to know wath is Phyton (I thing thats a
>programming language!). 

If you "need" to use Zope you don't need PHP3 at all, and maybe you don't
even need MySQL, although Zope and MySQL work well together. The last PHP
programmer we hired was pretty fanatic about that language but after his
first day working with Zope he told me he would never go back to PHP, ASP
or anything similar.

How do PHP and Zope compare? I like to say that if PHP is a restaurant,
Zope is a five-star hotel with restaurants and many other services that PHP
does not have and probably will never have simply because it has more
modest goals. 

Zope has its own HTML-embedded scripting language (DTML - Document Template
Markup Language), but it also has a powerful object model, suported by a
transactional OO database, both of which are absent in PHP and make Zope
much more powerful and productive. And it can be easily extended with
modules written in Python, an extremely powerful but easy to learn
scripting language. It can also be easily conected to MySQL, Oracle,
Postgress and many other relational databases. The way SQL conections and
queries are integrated into Zope is simply beautiful.

>I have already followed the instructions to create
>the 'Plutonia Web Site' From a manual of Zope, but that's it? It's the only
>thing to do? 

The main shortcomming of Zope today is the lack of good documentation,
especially for beginning to intermediate users (advanced users tend to read
the source code...).

>And how can I see the page working as a internet user will see
>it (when I put www.xxxxxx.xx to see the page. I used de view 'tag' on top of
>the right frame on the creation of the web page). And how can I use it with
>the Apache web server?

Regarding Apache integration, Zope runs just like any other CGI, but it has
a persistent-CGI mechanism which gives it better performance than plain
CGIs. We at Hiperlogica, and I believe almost everyone in this list, always
deploy Zope behind an Apache server. There is also another high-performance
option: the Python-powered Medusa server, which should become more populer
coupled with Zope2 and beyond. 

The URL issue you raised is solved with the Apache rewrite mechanism, which
translates the URL the user sees (like <http://www.magnet.com/bits/>) to a
Zope URL (like <http://www.magnet.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi/bits/>; BTW this is
a real example of a Zope-based site). If you need more details about this,
look at the WEBSERVER document included in the Zope distribution.

[]s
Luciano Ramalho

PS. If you want to discuss these and other issues in Portuguese, don't
hesitate to contact me directly, OK?