[Zope] - Selling Zope to your organization

[Kevin Dangoor]

On Mon, Jan 18, 1999 at 05:04:38PM -0800, Gabe Wachob wrote: 
,-----
| Hey folks-
|     Has anybody here had to go through the experience of selling Zope
| (and Python) to your own organization over another technology (esp.
| Perl/CGI)? At Findlaw, we are largely an open-source shop (though, we
| find our selves still using NT/IIS for a few reasons), and the folks we
| have all use Perl. I've tried to extoll the virtues of Python to the
| team members, but usually the response is "Bah, Perl works, I know it,
| and I don't want to learn something new".

Selling python over perl can be difficult because people know perl,
and python doesn't provide *functionality* that perl does not have.
I believe that python is a much cleaner, much more readable and easier
to maintain language... but if you go down that road you'll likely
just get into a holy war. (Ever tried to get an emacs person to use vi?)

|     Zope seems like it could be a big part of that "sales pitch". That
| is, I'd like to be able to sit down with someone and show them how to
| write a "send mail to the webmasters" page without having to learn much
| Python at all. Has anyone had any success doing this? Has anyone used
| Zope as a way to get people using Python?
[stuff deleted]
| 
`-----

I think Zope is a much easier sale than python itself. DC themselves bill
Zope as more of an application server sort of tool (like Cold Fusion)
than a "CGI" tool. I don't know what the Cold Fusion language looks like,
but I don't think it's perl or python. Right now, everyone is trying to
find ways to bring applications to the web faster. Sure, you can roll
your own with perl/CGI or python/CGI, but I think more people will want
libraries and tools that provide more of the basic functionality you
need.

And *that's* where you can really sell Zope. If people aren't as keen
on python, just stress all of the great things Zope does for you:
object database with an easy way to call methods and access subobjects
through the web, already built web-based management interface, high-level
UI structures like "tree", powerful templates that utilize acquisition,
etc.

Plus, I think it is a real benefit that Zope is open source. Just from
reading this list, I can see that there is a growing community of
contributors that can help Zope acquire more features faster than its 
commercial competitors.

I think that one can sell Zope to a perl shop easier than selling them
python... and once they get into Zope, then they'll start learning python
and probably won't turn back.

Kevin

-- 
Kevin Dangoor
kid@ans.net / 734-214-7349