[Zope] is zope a solution?

[Chris McDonough]

tonyl@vextech.net wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I've recently discovered zope and have the feeling that it may be the
> solution to a pending application issue. However, I've worked through
> the tutorial and I guess I'm no wiser than before, and it didn't really
> convince me either way; possibly leading me to believe it's aimed at
> small site solutions.

Not by intent!  ;-)
 
> Anyway, I have a project that will need to allow around 10,000 users (or
> less) to access at least a million documents. Each user is grouped into
> one of a small handful of access levels (determined by cookies). The
> documents are pre-existing PDFs, spreadsheet et al. I.e. they're all
> static.

Zope's access control is independent of the mechanism used to store
state, so it can use cookies, basic auth, NT auth, etc.

The hardest part about this is a fulltext searching requirement (if it
exists).  You may want to look at Kaivo's DocumentLibrary tool for this.

If there is no fulltext searching requirement, then, well.. there are
certainly a number of ways to do this in Zope.  Some of them involve
storing all the content in the ZODB.  Others involve relational
databases.  Others involve the filesystem.  It's hard to be more
specific.  ;-)  But yes, it's certainly possible.

> A solution along the lines of a standard cgi based bespoke application
> isn't particularly taxing from a programming point of view, but clearly
> wouldn't offer what I believe to be the potential of zope with it's
> prebuilt goodies.

Which goodies are you particularly interested in?  Zope's got a lot of
them, but different people are interested in different ones.
 
> So, I'm wondering whether zope is up to the task (reliability and
> scalability), or whether I'm misunderstanding something.

A pretty good list of Zope sites is available via
http://www.zopezen.org/links .  Several sites on there are of the same
scale as what you describe.

-- 
Chris McDonough                           Zope Corporation
http://www.zope.org                    http://www.zope.com

""" Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones """