[Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope

[Brian Salisbury]

Thanks for your reply Kevin.  You answered most of the other questions that
didn't get answered before.  The advice is helpful.

As far as hosting, I've already got a dedicated server in California.  So I'd
rather try to make this work on it before paying someone more money to host a
site of mine.  But my problem is, with the dedicated option, I don't have root
access.  I can choose to have it co-located, which would mean I would have root
access.  But that means I would be managing the server myself without any
assistance from them.  So now I'm learning Linux and networking et al so I may
be able to manage the server myself remotely.

A couple more questions:

Does Zope help with the organization of "html" files?  Is it easier to know
where stuff is, or find if you don't?

Off-topic Linux question:

Is there anyway to remotely administer my server with an X Window interface like
KDE?

Thanks again,

Brian

Kevin Dangoor wrote:

> Hi, Brian
>
>     I'm not sure I saw responses to everything, so I thought I'd just throw
> in my couple of cents...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Salisbury <brian@hilarious.com>
> To: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org>
> Date: Sunday, September 05, 1999 11:16 PM
> Subject: [Zope] The Honest Scoop on Zope
>
> >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?
>
> While this is something I have not personally run into yet, I can tell you
> what people have reported in earlier messages on the list. A decent box (not
> even top of the line) running linux can do 1 million relatively complex hits
> per day. Zope is a good performer out of the box. Assuming you're running
> one of the most popular sites on the net and you're getting more than 1M
> hits per day, Digital Creations has announced something called "ZEO". This
> allows you to distribute synchronized Zope DBs among multiple machines.
> *That* should handle just about any performance requirement.
>
> >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.
>
> My experience has been that it is. My experience has also been that if there
> is any kind of reliability problem, the DC guys are there to help (free of
> charge), because they want this to be a very, very stable platform. On my
> site, Zope has run continuously and has only been restarted when I needed to
> restart it for something. In other words, I've had no problems with it going
> down.
>
> >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.
>
> Right now, Zope is not amazingly easy to learn. It has a lot of deep and
> powerful concepts, and the documentation is in a state of flux because of
> the big switch from Zope 1.x to Zope 2. That said, I think the learning
> curve is worth working through because the platform does so much.
>
> Zope has a really helpful user community and quite a few very active
> developers. You will start seeing a lot more prepackaged solutions. Though
> I'm fairly familiar and comfortable with Python, I don't think you even need
> to use python for the *vast* majority of applications because of new
> capabilities in Zope 2.
>
> >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 *can* interface with an external (ie not part of Zope) database such as
> Mysql, if you want it to. There is no reason it has to. (I don't use an
> external database). Zope works as a long-running process, as does a database
> server, so there is generally not a lot of overhead in using a database if
> it makes sense for your application.

> <snip>........................................</snip>

> >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.
>
> I give a lot of credit to DC. Those guys are very sharp and have made an
> excellent product. This has really encouraged all of the subsequent
> development.
>
> Kevin