[Zope] Phil Greenspun on ACS and ZOPE

[Kevin Dangoor]

----- Original Message -----
From: "LEE, Kwan Soo" <kslee@plaza1.snu.ac.kr>
To: <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 27, 2000 1:16 PM
Subject: [Zope] Phil Greenspun on ACS and ZOPE


> and more on ACS vs ZOPE here:
http://www.photo.net/building-community/infrastructure.adp
> (at the 2nd finding "ZOPE", I've not noticed this before. Did any one?)

This looks new. It looks like part ArsDigita University, so it probably *is*
new.

> I've enjoyed his writings and they definitely broadened my sight. But
somewhat feel we are challenged (or are we challenging?)

There really is a lot of good reading to do over there. One good thing about
Open Source is that we (zopefolk) can learn from the lessons they (ACSfolk)
have learned.

> See the "Our Data Model" section and what follows there of
http://www.arsdigita.com/doc/bookmarks.html. I think even myself can
implements not so difficultly what he boasts, except "the Ability to
correlate your bookmarks with other users with similar interests". Yes, I
know there is ZCatalog and ZSQL but his characterization of ACS and
ZOPE)"ACS is the thinnest possible layer on top of Oracle and Zope has its
own set of abstractions") half bought me, though the price tag of Oracle
repels more, ;-)

A very Zope-centric application *would* be hard to migrate to another
application platform. But, I feel that the Zope object model allows for much
cleaner application design than an RDBMS. There are some things you can do
easily with the ZODB and ZCatalog that would be somewhat messy in a RDBMS.

Interestingly enough, Greenspun talks about how SQL is a standard and (in
theory) it should be easy to move to another database. While it would
certainly be easier to move to another DB than it would be to move from Zope
to ACS, you should take a look over at the ACSpg (postgres) page...
actually, it appears that they've changed the name to "OpenACS" and put the
page at http://openacs.org

Anyhow, it looks like they've had some fun times getting ACS to work on
PostgreSQL, so it's not quite as simple as just plugging in a new database.

Kevin