[Zope] Considerations using Zope

[Satheesh Babu]

Tino,

*snip*
> I see many people complaing about the fact of zope using not
> plain files for objects. And any time I'm asking why zope should?
> Is there any RDBMS out there which stores its tuples in separate
> files?
Nope! In fact, it an RDBMS use this, I'll not use it :-) It is just that 
Zope is a bit ahead of its times and people have difficulty accepting 
it. Daniel's original mail was about how to "sell" Zope, which is why I 
pointed this out because, believe me, I've had to fight this fight about 
why I chose Zope, quite a few times.

The following is slightly off-topic:

ZODB's exposition via Zope that mimicks a filesystem is Zope's biggest 
advantage along with acquisition, IMO. However, when "selling" Zope, 
this is also its biggest disadvantage because people tend to associate 
hierarchical object database with outdated technology. Majority of us 
who learned programming after late 80's may not think excitedly about 
hierarchical or network databases. (Talk about being hypocrites, most of 
us support XML datasets which are nothing but hierarchical).

Because Zope so effortlessly mimicks filesystem, people *perceive* it to 
  support all operations you can do with a file system. I do too - old 
habits die hard :-) Often I see myself wishing for "Oh god, Zope makes 
all these things so easy. If only I had some kind of 
locking/tagging/versioning from which I can easily restore objects..."

Another issue is people usually want to put data into DBs from which you 
can easily extract it, do batch updates etc. Mass updation in Zope is 
still not as straight forward (meaning, can someone knowing only HTML 
and Javascript figure it out looking at Google) like in SQL "update xyz 
set x=y where z=a". Yes it can easily be done using a Python script, but 
  many newcomers to Zope may not know Python.

[This has been my fondest wish for 2 years] Perhaps Zope Corporation 
should hire some designers and make very colorful ads on techie/business 
magazines about how Zope supports RAD, inexpensive hardware, makes 
different development groups work in harmony (eg: SQL folks and HTML 
folks can easily work without stepping on each others toes), 
cross-platform, open standards like DAV, FTP, XML-RPC...

> What could be handy, however, would be a cvs pserver implementation
> for ZServer to ease the use of standard programming workflow without
> resort to the ZMI all the time.

Amen.

Best regards

S Babu
http://vsbabu.org/