[Zope] Zope vs other Web Languages.

[Michael R. Bernstein]

Steven Grimes wrote:
> 
> I've been asked by my superiors to justify using Zope for our web database
> applications from a performance perspective. I've searched the web and tried
> to search the Zope site for any relevant performance benchmarks comparing
> Zope to languages such as ASP, PHP and JSP. Has anyone done any real world
> benchmarks?

Sigh.

Unfortunately, there is almost no chance that Zope will
compare favorably to any of the options that you've
mentioned *purely from a performance standpoint*. This is
because DTML needs to be evaluated, and the engine that's
doing the evaluating is itself written in an interpreted
language (Python). Whereas the interpreting engines that
you've mentioned are written in compiled languages, or in
the case of JSP a bytecode compiled language (somebody is
certain to correct me on this if I'm wrong).

However, Zope is more than fast enough, so your superiors
are actually asking the wrong question.

The thing is, it's a heck of a lot cheaper to buy extra
hardware than it is to pay more people, and in my opinion,
Zope is a huge productivity enhancer when it comes to
building web-applications. Time to market is reduced,
because so much has already been built for you (user
management, security system, etc.), so you don't have to
reinvent the wheel (or Access Control Lists) for your
application. The same goes for XML-RPC, WebDAV, LDAP, etc.

Buying more hardware is cheaper than buying more
programmers, and scales much better too (ever tried adding
people to a late project?).

With Zope, I can build (for example) a fairly sophisticated
Intranet for a company in a couple of days, without breaking
into a sweat. This Intranet will include personal folders
for the users, a bug/ticket tracker, industry news,
departmental pages, and any of a dozen other goodies like
discussion forums and a collaborative documentation system.
Then I can refine it over another couple of days. By any
sane measure, this is far more cost effective for a company
than paying two or more programmers to build something
equivalent in a couple of months, just to save a grand on
hardware.

HTH,

Michael Bernstein.