[Zope] A few Zope advises...

[Thierry Florac]

  Hi...

My question is quite simple, but probably difficult to answer...

I'm actually starting a new huge project, which is a complete rebuild of
our huge 'intranet' server, actually based on Netscape Server. The new
server may be as 'free' as possible...

Zope seems to be the best free product actually available for us, to
handle the huge amount of documents we have to share, and what I
actually need is a few advises and best practices, as :

 - is there a "prefered" or "best working" operating system to run Zope
servers ?? I may have to choose between a Debian GNU/Linux server (SMP
on Intel) and a Solaris server (on Sparc). I've read here and there
several messages talking about problems with Zope on Solaris, are they
always true ??

 - as we also have a few applications to share, which can't be handled
by Zope before several weeks, is there a best way to combine Zope and
Apache ?? mod_proxy, mod_rewrite, pcgi, fastcgi, virtual hosts ??? What
are the benefits and drawbacks of each of them ??

 - as our needs are rather simple, and may just include customization
and improvements to standard products, are there any benefits or
drawbacks to write our new products as ZClasses, instead of full Python
written products ?? Are the performances of each other equivalent ??

 - as we may quickly have a large amount of documents stored in our Zope
database, is it a better practice to store everything into the ZODB, or
to make Zope handle only metadatas and store real documents into
external objects (by using products like ExternalFile, for example) ??
I'm a little afraid when thinking of all my files stored in a single
Zope database, and I think that storing documents externally may speed
up several processes like incremental backups...

As you can see, we are just starting our Zope evaluation, and so I'd
really like to receive any advise or suggestion to implement Zope as
well as possible...

Thank you for any advise or comment,

  Thierry


P.S. : please be kind to answer to this mail directly, because I had to
unsubscribe from this mailing list for professionnal reasons... :-((