[Zope] Zope v OpenACS and nonprofit application developers

[Bob Campbell]

I've been following ACS for a 2 years now. I've downloaded their software,
read a ton of stuff  about it, used Tomcat and Resin, and I still have a
homepage on photonet. I have absolutely nothing negative to say about it. It
is a great system.

It is not an easy system and there is nothing inherently wrong with that..
almost all good, configurable systems have a steep learning curve.
(Including Zope..as everyone knows.) And you are right, the complexity will
pay off. (with either system)

ACS was one of the systems we recently evaluated for our Intranet. We chose
Zope but many parts of the Intranet will be built with ideas that are
responsible for the success of ACS. And much of the evaluation of different
systems included a lot of knowledge gained from Philip Greenspun's posts and
his book, "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing."

One of the most valuable things I got from the book is that in Greenspuns
eyes, it not the web system (software) that is responsible for the glut of
poor web sites, lousy software and billions of wasted dollars, it is the
programming and design of the systems. (he is very blunt in his criticism of
the software/programming industry as a whole.)

He also stresses that ACS is not about a particular piece of software
(Oracle), a particular server (AOL) or a particular language, (TCL or Java).
It is really a philosophy centered around building online communities and he
doesn't care what tool you use as long as it is done within that philosophy.
He even emphasizes that if you are using ASP or some other system, don't
switch, just learn. He gives you damn near every piece of SQL that goes
along with this philosophy and tells you the why for almost every line of
code.

In some ways, the ACS users "concerns" are non-issues. If they followed
Greenspuns philosophy, they'd know better. Read the ACS discussion forums to
see how "easy" it is to use the built-ins. (and there isn't one of them that
cannot be done with Zope/CMF and a few already built products.

Scalability depends on dozens of other factors besides the "relational
model." Both systems will scale if designed right and run over a solid
infrastrucure.
 Having said that, ACS does have a history with large complex data driven
sites, but hell, so don't a lot of other systems. Again, it depends more on
who is doing the site rather then the tool used implement the design.

Personally, I'd love to see more about the building and designing of complex
scalable sites from the Zope community or even borrowing some of Greenspuns
stuff and putting it in Zope terms. How about some Java as well?

One final thought. Interestingly enough, when Greenspun talked about ARIA
(OODB) he said,

 "Does this mean ARIA is the perfect tool? My biggest complaint with it is
that I've already sold my site's soul to a     relational  database."


Bob Campbell










----- Original Message -----
From: "Anders Schneiderman" <aschneid@pop.mindspring.com>
To: <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2001 8:17 AM
Subject: [Zope] Zope v OpenACS and nonprofit application developers


> 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
>
>
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