[Zope] Newbie: Zope a webserver? Serving PHP and Perl

[Martijn Pieters]

On Thu, Jul 13, 2000 at 05:44:23PM -0500, Lucas Young (c) wrote:
> Have just installed Zope under Win2K and it works fine - I see a lot of
> people mention using Apache to server Zope, but isnt Zope a webserver
> itself? I can browse to http://server:8080/ and view Zope pages, so why
> would I need Apache?
> 
> Also, How do I set Zope up so it handles PHP tags? 

Your second question answers your first.

Zope's ZServer does indeed serve HTTP, but it only serves Zope objects.
Apache, on the other hand, allows you to serve much more, including PHP. You
can use Apache to integrate the two, there's a How-To on Zope.org that
explains how to do this, IIRC.

Basically, reasons for using Apache are:

- Using SSL (but there is an addon product for ZServer that covers this as
  well)

- Integration with other content, like static files and, in your case PHP.

- Virtual servers, competing for ip addresses or ports.

- Serving virtual servers out of Zope.

This is not a complete list, but these are the most important reasons.

On the other hand, using Apache introduces another level of complexity to your
setup, introducing a speed bump, a potential source of misconfiguration
problems, and another link in the chain that could break.

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer            mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations          http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope               http://www.zope.org/
| ZopeStudio: http://www.zope.org/Products/ZopeStudio
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