[Zope] can I move my zope site off zope?

[Jason Earl]

"Jacob Singh" <jacob@prisonbooks.org> writes:

> Well, I'd probably use PHP/MySQL because of it's strong following and
> general knowledge.  Also because of it's ease of portability.  Also,
> it's easier because I know SQL programming and ZODB seems like a bitch
> work with because dtml is so limiting (to me), probably because of my
> ignorance of it.  

PHP/MySQL is a well tested combination, available from nearly every
web hosting service on the planet.  I am a former PHP user myself, and
I personally feel that you could do much worse than PHP.  PHP also has
a much shallower learning curve than Zope, and the documentation
available for PHP is excellent (Zope's documentation has improved
dramatically, but it is still lacking).

However, Zope is no slouch either.  I tend to put my data in an RDBMS
(PostgreSQL to be precise), for much the same reasons that you stated
in your original post.  I am not concerned about getting data out of
PostgreSQL once I put it there, nor am I concerned that my database
will get too large for PostgreSQL to handle.  I am not quite as
confident in the ZODB.

That being said, I think that Zope and ZSQL have definite advantages
over PHP.  For one thing the fact that Zope is a persistent process
means that it can be much more intelligent about connection pooling
and data caching.  Instead of having a separate persistent connection
for each instance of Apache you end up with a pool of connections that
Zope can re-use intelligently.  I also appreciate the fact that Zope
forces me to separate my SQL code from my other logic code.  With PHP
it is far too easy to jumble SQL with business logic and presentation
logic making your site much harder to maintain.

Zope + ZSQL also gives you XML-RPC for free.  I like being able to
re-use the logic I have written in my Zope site in other applications,
and ZSQL is a nice database abstraction layer just in case you ever
feel like migrating to another database.  With Zope you also get built
in security awareness, that's handy too.

DTML *is* limiting, but in a good way.  Web designers whose eyes would
pop right out of their heads when confronted with PHP or Python can
actually get work done in DTML, and the new TALES templating stuff is
even cooler.  Most business logic, however, should probably be written
in Python.  I happen to really like Python, so this makes me happy :).
Better yet the new Python Scripts allow you to use a significant
portion of Python without playing with External Methods or building
products.

Zope is very cool, and not only because of the ZODB.

Jason