[Zope] jakarta struts

[David Shaw]

> New version of Jakarta Struts seem to have many
> time-saving and rapid development features for
> developers. Check out this oreilly article at
> http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2002/10/30/jakarta.html?page=1
>
> I'm still new to zope and learning from the online
> book. What are your comments on these 2
> framework/platform? Anyone used both before?

Struts is a whole different animal from zope.  Aside from the obvious 
differences (python versus java), Struts is a framework and tag 
library, whereas Zope is a programming framework, a fairly extensive 
class library, two different tag libraries (DTML and TAL/TALES), an 
application server, and a web server.  With struts, you still have to 
add tomcat or WebLogic before you can develop or deploy.

One thing that Zope and struts have in common is the concept of 
separating presentation from logic.  In the days of DTML, Zope could 
not claim this, but with page templates Zope is actually better than 
struts in this regard.  Struts uses a "Model Controller View" 
architecture.  You could use a similar design in Zope.  I try to do so 
when I develop in Zope by using page templates as the view, python 
scripts as the controller, and a files system product as the model 
containing the business logic.

We recently deployed a very large-scale app on WebLogic using struts.  
My only complaint is that you end up creating a lot of forms and 
actions that seem redundant.  I think Zope the application server could 
learn a lot from WebLogic (true clustering, failover, remote node 
management, remote application deployment, etc), but I don't know that 
Zope the development platform has that much to learn from struts.