[Zope] zope vs. siteserver from ms.siteserver newsgroup

[Brian Lloyd]

> Here's an exchange I had with a guy in the MS Site Server 
> general Usenet
> Newsgroup... can anyone find exception with his or my arguments?
> Additionally, he doubts the ability of Zope to handle large 
> sites (near the
> end of the message).  Any clarifications are appreciated....
> 

> > On the opposite, ZOPE is interpreted, not only the 
> templates, even the
> > server itself. No paradigm like COM is part of the game 
> (though it might
> > be extended). So ZOPE will be less speedy.

COM happens to work just fine with Zope :^) I've written a
demo ExchangeFolder before that let you march into the
Public Folders on your Exchange server as a little test too
see if it would work. To me, the whole argument of "COM 
components are compiled, so they'll be faster" is sort of 
a lark anyway. 

If you wanted to, you could crank up your copy of VC++ and 
crank out a COM component for your business logic. The fact
that people don't seem to be doing this (or even clamoring 
for info on how to do this) is telling. From the point
of view of a web developer, the issue is not "gee, how many
milliseconds faster can this COM component execute my query",
its "how fast can we get this project done". Some people seem
inexplicably not to have caught on to that yet :^)


> > 
> > Also: I really doubt the scalability of the ZOPE Object database,
> > compared to the SQL Server that is part of the site server 
> licensing.
> > The ZOPE Object database - well - there are no benchmarks on it.

There are no benchmarks, true. It might be worth noting, though,
that the actual backing storage of the object db is pluggable,
documented and extensible. This architecture is specifically 
designed to allow the use of alternate backing stores (oracle,
other enterprise dbs, etc.) -- including SQL Server if you were
so inclined.


> > "When you do this, you're basically extending the Zope 
> environment by
> > creating your own object types without having to know a high-level
> > programming language (ala C++/Visual Basic COM object 
> development)." -
> > well, just you do it in a slow interpredet language, where C++ COM
> > Objects will be speedy!

Yep, speedy as hell - and a year late ;^) See above.


> > "The power of this model is formidable.  For example, I developed a
> > "news item" object in 22 minutes which allows my users to add "news
> > items" to their department for perusal by other department 
> members." -
> > nive. What about adding 100.000 news items. What is the performance
> > then? This is unrealistic? OK, lets make an interface for a 
> news server.
> > 1 million messages a day. Youre dead.

This seems a simpleminded argument. If you are going to do
something like a news server interface, you are also going
to do the obvious design work beforehand that takes scale 
risks into account. I believe he entirely missed the most 
important points of your statement - "22 minutes", the 
implied department-level scope of your solution, and the 
fact that it worked for you.

The "youre dead" bit makes me wonder whether it's really worth
much time bothering with this guy - you can't really answer
someone who obviously already knows all the answers :^)


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com