[Zope] Zope v OpenACS and nonprofit application developers

[Anders Schneiderman]

Just to add to Michael's post:

People who use openACS have raised two major concerns about using 
Zope.  First, although Zope is easier when starting off, openACS comes a 
much more developed, integrated system of modules out of the box, and so 
althought it is more complex, the complexity pays off.  Given that our goal 
is to build open source apps that work well for larger as well as smaller 
organizations, this is an important consideration.

The much more serious issue is whether openACS scales much better than Zope 
does.  People who use openACS say that its model can handle much larger 
apps, due in large part to the fact that openACS is built on a very solid, 
thoroughly tested data model that uses a relational database 
approach.  Given that at least one of the participants, techrocks, needs a 
platform that can handle tons of people, this is a pretty big issue.

So, as someone participating in the discussion over platforms, I'd be very 
interested to hear from people who have used Zope to build large scale 
applications.  In particular:

1)  How large of an application have you been able to build with Zope 
without seeing serious performance problems?  I.e., how many users, hits 
per day/hour, etc.?

2)  When you build a large-scale application in Zope, do you have to use a 
RDMS on the back end?  Is there a point at which Zope's object system isn't 
enough anymore?  The reason this is important to us is that there are lots 
of advantages of using an object system, but if you need to rewrite the 
backend into a relational database as the app gets larger, then openACS, 
where the database is there at the beginning, starts to look like a better 
deal.


Any thoughts/comments would be extremely helpful.

Thanks,
Anders Schneiderman
Information Manager
SEIU International