[Zope] Re: documentations?

[Martijn Pieters]

Hi Ryan,

First of all, you can best ask questions about Zope on the Zope
mailinglist; I send this reply there as well. Sending questions to the
list lets you tap into the vast experience of the community. More
information can be found at:

  http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists

I combined your two emails into one for easy answering.

On Mon, Mar 12, 2001 at 12:13:08PM +0800, chowryan wrote:
> - Are there any documentations that would help me with the tasks I need
> to do? I managed to get the server up and running but there are things I
> don't quite get!

There are several. Look at:

  http://www.zope.org/Documentation

I especially recommend the Zope book:

  http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB

> - Zope's system can include other languages such as Javascript, Java
> (applets), perl, C, C++ ??

Other language support:

  Javascript -- Do you mean Javascript at the browser (client) side? Zope
    doesn't need special support for that, only the browser needs that. Just
    put Javascript in your generated HTML and let the browser do the rest.
    As for server-side, there is none at the moment. But as Javascript as
    part of Mozilla is open source, you can add it yourself.

  Java applets -- Applets are client side; Zope is server side. Drop them
    into Zope as File objects and everything will run. There are some
    efforts for getting server-side support for Java from the community. If
    you want to use Java server-side, you can have a look at JPE (Java
    Python Extensions), which let's you access Java code from Python code:

      http://sourceforge.net/projects/jpe

  Perl -- Yes, you can. ActiveState has done an excellent job of building
    Perl into Zope. See:

      http://www.zope.org/Members/andym/wiki/FrontPage

  C and C++ -- Speed critical areas of Zope have been implemented in C.
    Building C or C++ extensions to Python is easy. See the Python
    documentation on this subject:

      http://www.python.org/doc/1.5.2p2/ext/ext.html
      http://www.python.org/doc/1.5.2p2/api/api.html

> - You said that I can host grant our clients privileges to manage their
> site that we created for them but would we be able to manage our won
> site with this system.  Like be able to do a direct transfer from our
> current site?  What would it involve?

Of course you can manage your own site yourself as well. The keywords here
are manageability and delegation. You can easily manage your site, and you
can delegate control of (part of) your server to others.

There are ways of importing existing websites into Zope, but mostly only
static HTML, files and images. Using Python and Perl you can usually
convert your existing CGIs without too much trouble as well. Give the
mailinglist more details, and they probably can help.

Hope this helps!

-- 
Martijn Pieters
| Software Engineer  mailto:mj@digicool.com
| Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com/
| Creators of Zope   http://www.zope.org/
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