[Zope] A few Zope advises...

[Mike Renfro]

On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 06:45:49PM +0200, Thierry Florac wrote:

>  - 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 ??

All mine run on Debian (i386). I'm far more comfortable there than in
Solaris, and all my Solaris installations are scientific workstations
anyway. So no Solaris servers here. One thing to keep in mind is that
if you:

- want to run Debian's stable release, and
- want to run the latest Zope, and
- don't want to compile either Zope or Python yourself

you might run into trouble. Debian's release schedule is very
conservative (some might even say slow). The main hitch is when Zope
starts requiring a newer version of Python than Debian has in its
stable release (as happened between Zope 2.3 and 2.4). Workarounds
include:

- tracking something other than the stable release of Debian, or
- building more recent Zope/Python sources into Debian packages, or
- building more recent Zope/Python sources into /usr/local

And this says nothing about relative hardware reliability between
Sparc and Intel platforms, which may or may not be a factor in your
decision.

>  - 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 ??

I use proxy and rewrite (insert plug for
http://www.zope.org/Members/mwr/VHosts_With_Zope_Default), and each
major production site gets its own INSTANCE_HOME for custom
products. A Zope VirtualHostMonster can make Zope content in a
subfolder look like content in the root folder of that site.

>  - 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 ??

Python. Use http://www.zope.org/Members/maxm/HowTo/easyProduct to get
a quick start; as quickly as one can develop a Python product with
Max's structure in place, I'd be surprised if a ZClass was much
faster. I think he's working on an updated version including Catalog
awareness and perhaps some cosmetic changes to the management
interface to make it look more like core Zope products. I have no idea
about performance differences, if any.

>  - 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) ??

Do you need to take advantage of Zope's "Undo" capabilities? If so, I
think you'll end up using the ZODB. If not, use one of the external
file products.

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

But since you can send email to the list, I'm sure we'd all love to
hear what profesional reasons prevent you from subscribing.

-- 
Mike Renfro  / R&D Engineer, Center for Manufacturing Research,
931 372-3601 / Tennessee Technological University -- renfro@tntech.edu