[Zope] PHP vs Zope

[Martijn Pieters]

On Wed, Mar 22, 2000 at 09:20:39AM -0600, Nikolai Vladychevski wrote:
> Very intersting stuff ... I think I will need finaly to try Zope my self
> to see how it is. But I have one more question, why they decided to base
> Zope on Python and not other language?

No such decision was ever made. When Paul Everitt and Rob Page founded Digital
Creations (a history I know only from Paul's and Rob's telling me, I could
well be out for lunch on this), Paul was getting quite heavily into Python
already. He convinced Rob that it might be a good language to base their
development on.

They then hired Jim Fulton, then already a very active Python contributor (he
hosted, if IIRC, the 3rd and/or 4th python conference or something). Under his
technical guidance software was developed that only in November/December 1998
came together to form Zope.

Many parts of what is now Zope, like Bobo (predecessor of the ZODB), DTML
Templates, Extension Classes and Acquisition where already Open Source, and
heavily used by the python community. When Zope came to be, all those parts
were mixed with things like Acquaduct (now database adapters and ZSQL
Methods), and Principia (now the web management interface and many of the
stock Zope objects like File and Folder), that were commercially sold by
Digital Creations.

So, python made Zope and its power possible. If you now decide that you want
to go and build Zope in a different language, you will first have to try and
build all those parts from which Zope came to be. And this will be pretty
hard, if not impossible. Pythons clarity, OO orientation, extensibility and
last but not least Jim's technical excellence with python will be greatly
missing.

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer    mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope       http://www.zope.org/
|   The Open Source Web Application Server
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