[Zope] Zope vs. PHP

[Kevin Dangoor]

-----Original Message-----
From: Ben Glazer <glazer@scicomp.com>
To: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org>
Date: Tuesday, September 07, 1999 6:21 PM
Subject: [Zope] Zope vs. PHP


Michel answered pretty much everything, but I'll toss in a couple extra
cents.

>1. Do any tools exist to make it easy to upload/download an entire website?
>What about transferring the Zope database over FTP?  (The real question
here
>is "How do people backup their remotely-hosted Zope websites?")

I backup my website just by FTPing the "Data.fs" file. This is the entire
Zope DB, in one convenient place. As Michel mentioned, there are many ways
to get your data out of (or into) Zope, but backup is quite easy.

>Also, if anyone has used both Zope and PHP, I'd be very interested to see a
>(more or less) objective comparison of the two.  Clearly, this forum favors
>Zope.  Are there situations in which PHP is a better choice?  Has anyone
yet
>written a detailed comparison of the two products?

I used PHP quite a bit in '96 and '97. I know it has changed quite a bit
since then, but most of the changes have been object extensions to the
language, new modules and performance (as far as I've seen).

To me, PHP is something that can be more readily compared to Python. PHP is
really a scripting language, it just happens that it is a scripting language
geared toward the web and is designed to be mingled with your HTML.

Zope's web object model, object database, ZClasses, ZCatalog, permissions
system, etc. really make it feel like it is a layer above PHP in terms of
the services it provides. It makes it easy to do many things that web folks
commonly want to do, and makes it easy to extend if you want something that
is not quite so common.

I recently took another look at PHP (when I read about PHP 4.0 beta). I
think I'm inclined to agree with Michel... once you reach a certain point of
knowledge with Zope, you're not going to want to turn back.

Kevin