[Zope] ArsDigita .. request for comments

Sat, 04 Mar 2000 09:36:26 -0600

I will have to concur that Philip's book is a very good read. In
addition to his book he has great suggestions for your library of other
books. There are many of his ideas I think are wonderful, however I do
have some philosophical disagreements on others.

Some of his views of computers and programming are somewhat cynical even
if based somewhat on fact.

His version of scalability of which he focuses on a lot is basically
throw lots of money at it.
Start off with a highly scalable, multi-threaded, high quality webserver
with an embedded scripting interpreter. In his case AOLserver with Tcl.
He openly hates Tcl, but doesn't work towards using the language he
likes where he works. Further more he thinks doing so is folly. (my
interpretation) He states relational dbms are the only way to store
data. Other technologies aren't as mature or capable. And on relational
dbs only Oracle is sufficient. With others you are taking unnecessary
risk.

So to scale with Philip you develop with AOLserver/Tcl/ACS, buy big,
expensive hardware, buy big expensive database. ie: throw lots of money.
Since he prefers everything to be in a single machine you can only scale
up processors so much before the $$$ start escalating. Price an 8
processor anything versus a Linux cluster of 8 machines.

This is not enabling for the little guy. Yes I know of the ACS port to
PostgreSQL. I think that's great. However it is going to be a step
behind ArsDigita/ACS because it does require porting to become
PostgreSQL able.

He has disparaging remarks about app servers, many of which are true.
However, I do not necessarily believe that learning Zope/webserver is
more difficult than learning AOLserver/ACS. And when you've got Zope
you've got Python instead of Tcl. For some of us, we like that. :)

As a prodigal son here, I embraced Bobo/Zope early, became concerned
about scalability, wandered the websphere, and have come back home. I
have looked at Java/Servlets/Enhydra, AOLserver/ACS, etc. I decided to
follow my heart. I like Python and Zope. I like the Python and Zope
communities. This is where I want to make a difference and contribute.

Zope can enable the idea person, the little guy with a twinkle in his
eye and a big dream to pursue.

Sure it may not "currently" scale as easily as AOLserver/ACS for big,
busy sites. However, I think it is being worked on. I think that there
are options within Zope, Digital Creations. To a very large extent
Philip solves scalability with $$$dollars.

With Zope you can still throw $$$dollars at Oracle. You can also throw
some at Sybase, or whateverBase you desire. If that gains you
scalability or the ability to sleep at night it's available. With
ArsDigita/ACS the only supported option is Oracle.

If I believed throwing $$$dollars to solve scalability was required. I
would much rather throw $$$dollars at Digital Creations. Instead of a
$20,000 to $500,000 on up license of Oracle which is per machine, per
website, and potentially expires. Instead of requiring buying big, big
hardware for $$$dollars. Throw the money towards Digital Creations or
other Zope or Python developers to solve the issues which hold
Zope/Python back. In the end you will have helped build a bigger, better
open source software solution.

As a little guy with ideas and dreams, this is my view. By the time a
website grows enough to run into scalability and performance problems
with Zope it could potentially be making enough $$$dollars to contribute
to solutions. Try that with AOLserver/ACS/Oracle, start with $$$dollars
and then hope for the best.

My other thoughts wandered into employment. When I master either Zope or
AOLserver/ACS, would I rather work for ArsDigita (yes, they pay well) or
Digital Creations, if an opportunity presented itself in the future. As
I know both are growing companies. I like Digital Creations. :) 

On a side note, on the AOLserver mail list there is effort to embed
Python and get Zope running on AOLserver. I think it would be great to
see Zope/Python being multi-thread, multi-processor able on a high
performance open source, multi-threaded webserver. It would be awesome
to have an embedded Python interpreter in AOLserver without a global
threadlock that worked with AOLserver's multi-threaded API running Zope.

On another side. A website I just learned about does a performance index
of many sites and gives a average amount of time to load pages. This
could put into perspective Zopes performance from the real world, from
your own website. 

http://www.keynote.com/measures/consumer/consumer40.html

Just some opinions.

Jimmie Houchin

Robert OConnor wrote:
> 
> Hi Kent,
> You wrote:
> 
> > Does anyone out there have opinions on Phil Greenspun's app server;
> > http://www.arsdigita.com/index.adp
> > and the ArsDigita Community System
> > http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/toolkit/index.html
> > I want to set up a niche portal and am looking at
> > Zope and the above ACS
> 
> Phillip has written a great book that I highly
> recommend to ALL Zope users:
> 
> "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing"
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558605347
> >From Amazon review:
> "....[It] is both broadly conceptual and deeply technical,
> and it assumes that the reader is willing to think seriously
> about the challenge of building a content site, a community
> site, or an e-commerce store before plunging in.
> 
> Although heavily Unix-oriented, it does not set out to
> proselytize a product, or even suggest that there is only
> one way to solve certain technical challenges. Rather,
> it encourages the reader to think about Web
> content and functionality as something designed to
> help visitors answer questions or do something useful.
> This may sound nebulous, but his observations about why
> Web sites go bad are illustrated with many
> well-chosen examples....."
> 
> Bob's comments:
> 
> Ok, this book is also "FREE" and fully on the web at:
> http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook/
> and has reader comments...
> The dead tree version is on glossy paper with
> many of Phillip's excellent photos and is the only
> tech book that would set well on a coffee table.
> 
> Both AOLserver/ACS and ZOPE are open source ...great.
> 
> One disadvantage I see with AOLserver/ACS is the
> high cost of Oracle used as a back end.  Some in the
> ACS community have talked of using other back end
> databases (particularly databases that handle transactions
> and are open sourced) but I don't know of how far this has
> progressed in the past three months.   Philip does make a
> good point about the database passing the "ACID" test which
> is "Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation and Durability"
> See:
> http://www.photo.net/wtr/thebook/databases-choosing.html
> I am not sure that the Zope object database meets the ACID test.
> 
> ArsDigita sells it services to large clients with big bucks (along
> with givaways to good community projects.)
> I believe Digital Creations also serves large clients.
> 
> Zope is "cleaner" than AOLserver/ACS because it uses
> python rather than TCL and is "Object" based.
> 
> AOLserver/ACS seems to have has more "features"
> that are working on production sites.  Is Zope
> still weak in the e-commerce area?  The Zope portal
> is "almost" here.  See Philip's photo.net site for a
> working community system. ...
> 
> I have played with both products but have yet to do
> productive sites for paying clients with either product.
> I am interested in the comments of others
> both on or off list.
> 
> -Bob OConnor zope@rocnet.com
> 
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