[Zope] contrasting Zope vs. Vignette

[Christopher Petrilli]

> First, I'd like to that Chris and Anthony who gave me some pointers
> for things to look out for at the meeting with Vignette.  I hope that
> it is not inappropriate to post my reactions to this list.  I think
> many of us are interested in comparisons of Zope to other products.

This is exceptionally valid I believe.  While "we" might believe Zope is the
best technology on the market, there are still many places where other
products might have interesting ideas that could be "purloined" for our use
in some form or another.

> [...] but> mostly it is that Vignette has a marketing mindset and Digital
> Creations has an engineering mindset.  (Which I like, I should add.)

Thank you.  Part of it is that "engineering" doesn't sell a $1M deployment,
marketing does.  Make no mistake that while Vignette might be "off the
shelf" software, it is hardly user installable, and often requires many
hundreds of hours of consulting (at a rather high rate) to get to any point
that is usable.  That doesn't mean that Zope is "easier to use", I don't
argue that.  However, there's less invisible magic given you can look
through the source code, as well as the fact that we are more open to
discuss *why* something behaves a specific way.

Often understanding *why* is more imported than *how* something behaves.

> [workflow]

We have some pretty amazing ideas for workflow, but I'll leave those to Paul
to announce when we're ready.   We do try not to announce things before
they're at least semi-functional :-)

> [comparison of Tcl v. Python scripting choices]

My understanding is that much of Vignette is built in Tcl.  Remember, you
don't need a data type besides a string... strings are your friends :-)

We have been, and continue to be, strong believers in the strength of
object-oriented development.  Because of that, we've realized one of the
purest approaches on the web (I believe THE purest, but I could be wrong),
and this is exceptionally powerful---but difficult to iterate in a
"marketing brochure" or to someone who is not well steeped in the ideology.
We are also believers in formal modeling (a'la UML) and process driven
development (The DC Unified Process) which I think is a large distinguishing
factor from any other company.  Try asking for models of their work :-)

> [discussion of caching approach]

One of the things to note is that our approach to object invalidation is
center to our scalability story---ZEO.  ZEO is basically a distributed
object replication system with real-time invalidation of objects.  This is
VERY powerful.

> When the cache is not in use StoryServer appears quite slow.  Even
> with the cache they only claimed 1M hits/day using a dual CPU Ultra 2
> sparc, which sounds much less than Zope.

While we're not a big SPARC shop, a minor projection of current benchmarks
we've done with ZEO indicate that on a dual CPU box (with 2 ZEO clients, and
a storage server) that we could achieve somewhere around 3.2M hits assuming
a minimal level of dynamicism.  Because of our strong dynamic nature, the
more dynamic, the less throughput you get---it's just more cycles per
request.  I would say a HIGHLY dynamic site on such a box would perform
around 1-1.5M hits live, as opposed to cached.

> [canned tools]

This is where the community comes in, in many ways.  We do have some ideas,
but we're just restricted in resources that we can dedicate to speculative
development, no matter how confident we might be in its usefulness.

> [Java v. Web interface]

I think one thing that came up in a discussion with one of Vignette's
integrators was that the Java GUI isn't that great in allowing for the
delegation of authority.  There's just not the kind of granularity in the
security system that we provide, so that you can give a multitude of
different people different capabilities without having to recreate your
interface that many times.

One thing I didn't hear any discussion of was the security model in
Vignette---what is it? How is it controlled? How flexible?

Chris
--
| Christopher Petrilli        Python Powered        Digital Creations, Inc.
| petrilli@digicool.com                             http://www.digicool.com