[Zope] Zope for dvd online shop

[Luciano Ramalho]

> I like your advice to know when it's a good soluiton to use
> Zope to make an online shop wich sell dvd. I'll have 2600
> differents dvd. I think, i'll use Zclasses for each DVD. Is
> it a good solution mainly for processing time when sorting
> DVD by actor or genre or ...

We have developed a DVD catalog site entirely in Zope with ZClasses.

Initially, we did it with Zope and Oracle because of a client
requirement. As soon as that requirement was lifted, and we were free to
deploy the content in multiple sites, Oracle became an obstacle and so
we rewrote the whole thing using nothing but the ZODB. We had only 4
days to do the conversion, so we took a RAD approach: ZClasses,
ZCatalogs and Python Scripts (no external Python).

The original Oracle schema had 25 tables, about 1/3 of which were link
tables (to establish many-to-many relationships). It took only 6
ZClasses to represent the same domain, and much better in our opinion.
We also think performance was improved, but we have no hard data to
support that assertion. Performance did not suffer noticeably, that is
certain, and before we had Oracle running on a second and more powerful
hardware than Zope was.

We currently have about 2500 DVDs in our catalog, and more than 3000
actors/directors. You can see one instance of the catalog here:
<http://dvdb.com.br/>.

Best regards,

Luciano