[Zope] PHP vs Zope

[Eric W. Sink]

In a technological sense, comparing PHP and Zope is a little bit silly,
since they are so very different.  In a practical sense, comparing them
is extremely reasonable, since there are a wide variety of web development
tasks which can be approached with either PHP or Zope.

Performance comparisons are the toughest.  PHP is no slouch -- it is used
for some very high traffic sites, including freshmeat.net and lots of
others.

Zope, on the other hand, offers some features which will cause it to
outperform stock PHP in many cases.  PHP is a scripting language for
website development.  In contrast, Zope is described as an application
server.  As such, Zope includes features like pooling of database
connections and caching of database query results.  These are not
as easy to do in technologies like PHP, and they can make a huge
difference in the performance of database-driven sites.  We
implemented www.CodeCatalog.com twice -- once in Zope, and once in
PHP.  The Zope version ended up much, much faster.  Your mileage
may vary.

I'm pretty sure it's possible to get good performance from PHP and
Zope, if your situation is appropriate and you're willing to work at
it.

I am equally sure that it's pretty easy to get lousy performance from
either PHP or Zope, if your situation is especially inappropriate, and
you're willing to live entirely off the low hanging fruit.

There are lots of other comparisons which could be made, and have been
made.  These comparisons tend to degenerate into flamewars pretty quickly,
although I see no reason for this to happen.  Objective comparisons
of two technologies like this are useful.  I happen to like both, although
Zope certainly gets an increasing share of my attention.

Zope's three-tiered architecture and web-based authoring tends to make
the tool more approachable by people who may be less technical, and
more annoying to hardcore programmers who find they have a new paradigm
to learn.  The gap between the experiences of these two groups of
people tends to narrow very quickly as people start to grasp the soul
of what Zope is all about.  People who are learning Zope tend to
periodically burst out of their office with a desperate need to
tell someone about the latest core principle of Zope which they finally
came to understand.  The more you have these "light bulb" experiences,
the cooler Zope is.

PHP isn't like that.  It's an excellent tool, but it's really just
a scripting language.  It isn't everything that Zope is, and it
doesn't try to be.

Compare PHP to Python

Compare Zope to Midgard.

BTW, the safest way to do those comparisons is *probably* to do them
somewhere other than on this mailing list.  :-)

--

>Hello,
>I recently started to work with php (+ Apache), and now I found Zope. At
>the first sight, Zope seems to be faster than php, but I don't know if
>it's my php application that is not so complex than Zopes objects. So I
>would like to ask, is there a benchmarks or articles or any sources that
>discuss about performance and developing PHP versus Zope? Also, i am
>cuirious, was Zope developed to replace PHP in the future? And what if
>PHP comes up with an interface like Zope, so what would be better? Many
>questions, isn't it ....
>
>Any comments are welcome.
>
>Thanks.
>Nikolai
>
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Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman
SourceGear Corporation
eric@sourcegear.com