[Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope

[Phil Harris]

Hi Brian,

I'm by no means a Zope master but I'll try to answer some of your questions.

----- Original Message -----
From: Brian Salisbury <brian@hilarious.com>
To: <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Monday, September 06, 1999 3:58 AM
Subject: [Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope


> Hello List,
>
> I've been kicking around the idea behind Zope for quite a while.  There
> are a some questions I have about it.  These are things I consider
> important to publishing on the web.
>
> Is Zope scalable?  Will Zope be able to support me if my site suddenly
> becomes popular and I've got to go out buy one of those huge web server
> machines?
>
> Is Zope reliable?  I come from windows world, so anything that runs more
> than 30% of the time generally please me; but, what's serving my web
> documents and collaboration system has to be extremely reliable.

Zope2 seems to be emminemtly reliable, the only time I've brought it down,
both Win32 and Linux, is to add products (momentary) and also when the
machine itself needs rebooting for some other reason.

>
> Is it easy to learn?  I have virtually *no* programming experience.
> Everything I've done to this point has consisted of guess-editing
> pre-cooked Perl CGI scripts.  I don't know where to begin learning Zope
> and, obviously Python, since it goes with Zope.  Do you remember what it
> was like to think of having to 'Program' and getting the shivers?
> That's me.  I've never even looked at source code.  I think I compiled
> some stuff once ;).  Most of my web publishing, to this point, has
> consisted of serving mostly static web files with SSI, and CGI files for
> interactive stuff.

I can almost guarantee that you will be up and running in no time.

If you can do the SSI thing, stick some CGI scripts to work etc then you
should have no problems.

>
> My knowledge is getting fuzzy here.  Does Zope directly interact with
> things such as a Database?  I wouldn't want it having to call a process
> every time a message board action is requested.

Zope has DB adapters for most of the big boys, Oracle, MySQL and has an ODBC
link for others (note that the ODBC adapter has the possibility of running
not ponly on Win32 but also on Unixen)

>
> How endless are the possibilities?  In the Web Server/RDBMS world, one
> just has to program a script to call the DB to do whatever they need it
> to do.  I wouldn't want to have a great idea for my new site, then find
> out Zope, which I invested all of my time in money in, isn't able to
> accomplish x-task.

How far can you see?

That's how far Zope can go!

Since Zope is purely open-source, you have the possibility to get at the
innards of the machine.

Contrast the last statement to IIS for instance!

>
> Is everything in Zope stored in a (I'm guessing) Object Database?  I
> installed Zope on Windows 98 to poke around.  (I tried to install it on
> my dedicated server, of which I don't have root access, with no
> success).  It doesn't look like anything is stored in a physical file
> system.  I see two potential problems with this.  First, I would think
> it hard to transfer an existing site to Zope.  Plus, wouldn't it be very
> difficult to convert your Zope site to X-Platform should I have the need
> to at some point in the future?  I don't want to paint myself into a
> corner.

Yes it is stored in a ZODB (Zope Object DataBase).

Actually importing static files into the ZODB is dead simple.  There are a
few utilities around to do this, my favorite (and probably the most simple)
is fsimport which does a recursive import of a directory structure to the
ZODB.

>
> Let say I wanted to have someone manage the technical aspects of my
> Server(s).  How hard it would be to have someone maintain Linux, its
> connection, and Zope?  Could I have someone I could call on to write in
> custom scripts to accomplish what I need in Zope?  What kind of expenses
> would something like this incur in a Linux OS environment?  I would like
> to know how everything works, but I'm afraid I can't do it all by
> myself.  On the same token, I'm not a Fortune 500 company who has money
> burn.
>
> These are generally my biggest concerns.  Right now, I'm trying learn to
> Linux, Networking, and how I can more efficiently run a web site.  I'm
> considering buying a PC that strictly runs Linux so I can have it there
> full time for experimental/learing purposes.  Now pile on top of this
> the facts that I have returned to school with a full-time schedule, and
> I'm still maintaining my current site.  That means I don't have hours
> everyday to play around with Linux and Zope.
>
> I'd really appreciate any insight you have.  If I may say so, it really
> impresses me what so many folks collaborating together can accomplish.
> You really are defining the future.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Brian Salisbury

I hope this allays some of your fears.

See ya
phil@philh.org