[Zope] To Zope or Not To Zope?

[Ryan Daum]

A client of ours has approached us about designing and building a major
web portal project focused around a particular topic area with extensive
member services and content management abilities.  We now have to spec
this project out and at some point in the near future I will have to
decide on a WWW server/Application server/Database combination.  Zope is
in the running, along with WebObjects, NetObjects, ODI's ObjectStore +
ObjectForms, etc.

My initial impulse is to go with Zope because of its low cost overhead and
my expertise with Python as well as the access I have to this mailing list
and so on.  Unfortunately my desire to do implement python is offset by a
few major concerns, and I would like to see if anybody out there could
address these questions/concerns:

	1) Zope seems to want to operate in a configuration of web server,
application server, and object database all in one package.  I have
managed to get Zope to run using ZServer + Apache PCGI, but the
performance seems quite quite dismal.  My concern is mainly scalability: I
want to be able to use an industry standard web server (i.e. apache)
separate from the application server so that I could do things like scale
using multiple web servers, etc. etc.

	2) The same issue applies to the DB layer.  After floating through
all the documentation on the zope.org site I am unclear what the
relationship would be between Zope and an industrial strength database
like Oracle 8, etc.  I am wary of using Zope's own object DB because of
scale and compatibility issues, but most of the benefits of using Zope
would be mitigated if I ended up having to write SQL queries to access my
Oracle database.  The question is: is it possible to use a DB like Oracle
or Postgres, etc. transparently and in the same manner that I would be
using Zope's native db?  How about an object DB like ODI's ObjectStore?

	3) Zope is not "standard" enough that should I get run over by a
truck development could proceed without me.  Finding consultants and
programmers other than myself to work on this project could be difficult.

	4) At this moment in time my tendency is to want to sell the
client on implementing Apple's WebObjects + Oracle8, but the cost overhead
of that choice would limit the amount of revenue available for working on
the project.  What are other developers experiences with WebObjects, and
how would they compare them to Zope?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

	Ryan