[Zope] Allaire Spectra

[Michael Bernstein]

"Jay, Dylan" wrote:

> Has anyone  had a good look at Allaire Spectra?
> It looks like Zope on steriods. Or at least marketed that way. Perhaps
> someone can do a feature for feature comparrison.

I did a comparison for DC about three weeks ago. With Paul's permission, here is
a somewhat edited version:

Paul Everitt wrote:

<stuff deleted about DC's strategy>

> With that in mind, how does Zope, particularly the new Zope.org site,
> stack up against Spectra?

Hmm, keep in mind that I am basing this off of my evaluation of Allaire's canned
demo and marketing materials, as well as my experience using EAS.

As a portal toolkit and community site toolkit, and as an XML engine, Zope and
Spectra seem to be about on a par (ignoring hardware, platform and monetary
differences). The Zope management interface is very well suited to it's purpose
here.

You are making a distinction between Workflow and CMS, and I'm not sure you can
separate them that easily. Certainly content management is the primary
application of workflow on the web today. In this regard, Spectra (apparently)
blows Zope away with it's built in workflow system, which seems to allow you to
not only create new jobs to place in the workflow system using a point-and-click
web interface, but to generate new workflows, mapping various tasks to Roles and
permissions, all without writing any interface code. And then you can create a
new instance (job) and set the workflow in motion. All thorugh the web.

As far as I'm aware, Zope does not yet have a general workflow tookit, although
individual workflow applications of various sorts have been built.

Get this: Almost all of the management and meta-management interfaces are
dynamically generated from the object model. Some of this could be accomplished
in Zope by allowing developers to incorporate 'naked' elements from the
management interface (for example propertysheets) into their DTML without the
'chrome' of the tabs etc.(ie: <dtml-var propertysheetform>). If an object had
more than one propertysheet, it would be nice to be able to include them all in
one add/edit form, and have Zope do the heavy lifting

Currently, it is possible to generate add and edit forms for ZClasses, and then
edit the DTML to change the appearance. But if the ZClass definition changes,
those forms need to be re-generated, and the appearance changes done again. This
seems as though it could be handled a little more elegantly by embedding a call
for a 'naked' form that is dynamically generated, into a DTML document that
contains all the code for the appearance of the page. That way when the ZClass
definition changes, the form would too.

Spectra seems to conditionally render every single interface element depending
on your permissions. Viewing an object that you have permission to alter? see an
edit icon. Viewing an edit form that you have permission to redefine? see
another edit icon.

To match this capability, you would need to rebuild all of Zopes management
interfaces. And it's probably not worth it yet. Besides, the votes aren't in yet
as to whether integrating the management interface so deeply into a site is
entirely desireable.

Finally, Spectra has additional functionality built in that Zope does not in the
following areas:

- Personalization (including active personalization via observing  users
behaviour)
- Business rules (they call this Process Logic Paths or PLP's)
- Business intelligence (integrated OLAP and reporting for site activity and
workflow)

And the following functionality that Zope does have:

- Object Database (I beleive they've tacked on Objectivity for this)
- Service Syndication (seems to be like XML-RPC, I think they mean exposing a
sites
  functionality in such a way so other sites can integrate it into themselves)
- Content Syndication (via RSS)

I hope you find these comments helpful. Let me know if you would like to discuss
this further.

Michael Bernstein.