[Zope] Should I go with Zope?

[Kevin Dangoor]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Eric Walstad" <ewalstad@yahoo.com>
To: "Zope@ zope.org" <Zope@zope.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 29, 2000 6:33 PM
Subject: [Zope] Should I go with Zope?


> I've been trying out Zope on CodeIt's free 2 week
> trial and my trial is about over.  I have no
> experience with Zope prior to this trial account.  I
> went through the Zope Content Manager's tutorials and
> have tried to research it thoroughly.

Don't forget that you can also download Zope and try it out easily. I'm
running it on Win32 for some development tasks, and it did not take much
effort at all to install it and run it locally. So, if you want to continue
playing you can always do that.

> We are starting a new web application
> project and are looking for a stable, scalable
> platform that will be around and popular/supported for
> a long time.

In terms of popularity and being supported for a long time, I do believe
that DC has been quite successful in their consulting business, so they'll
be around. And, Zope itself is open source, so there will always be avenues
available for using it.

> 1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support
> for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and
> basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface
> with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's?

IMHO, you'll be quite happy wiht what you can do when you migrate those apps
to Zope. In the meantime, though, you can continue using them by setting up
Apache with rewrite rules that allow you to access those CGIs still. Without
knowing anything about your app, it's difficult to state how you would
"interface" with them. There are avenues for doing so. A pretty
straightforward one might be XML-RPC. (Your perl CGIs could access Zope data
via XML-RPC.)

> 2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes
> down?

I think Zope is pretty stable (and I think most regular users of it would
agree). It's not generally more likely to die than your system itself. If
you do "low-level" development on a different machine, your database should
be OK. Plus, all you need to do is back up your Data.fs file. If something
got really messed up, you just drop in the back up file.

I think the answer to "what if Zope goes down" is really the same kind of
thing as "what if the server goes down?" or "what if the drive crashes?"

If you really want, there is a Zope product that will mirror your site in
HTML (and others have used wget to mirror the site in HTML). But, I think
it's better to just maintain a solid Zope, because your site quickly goes
from being a static HTML thing to being a dynamically produced, interactive
thing which can't be reasonably represented by HTML.

> 3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at
> once? Can users access the applications reliably,
> repeatedly?

People on this list have done benchmarks using ab and other tools. I think
the general consensus was that with a moderate machine and a moderately
dynamic app you can do a million hits+ per day. Through more machine at it,
or go for ZEO (which lets you mirror the object database on multiple
machines) and you can handle lots and lots of traffic.

Our site (Byproducts.com) has been running on Zope since last May. I've had
very little downtime and I don't think I would blame any of it on Zope.

Kevin