[Zope] Re: [Zope-dev] Newbie Question

[Lennart Regebro]

Aaron Paxson wrote:
> I'm currently learning Java, and was starting to learn the RedHat Web
> Application Framework.  I've found Zope in an article on the web, and
> started to look into it.  It looks to be just as scalable, but I'm curious
> on how extensible it is, as well as, it's power in a corporate environment.

Infinitely scalable really. Zope is no more power hungry than any other 
dynamic web environment. Zope corp has made really big installations 
with silly amounts of load.

> For example, how extensible is it, to modify the security module and have it
> authenticate against LDAP?

There is an excellent LDAPUserFolder for this, ready for use.

> Also, how powerful is Python as compared to Java?

About the same. Python has some nice things, Java has some nice things. 
One cool thing about Python is that it is very dynamic, which makes some 
things extremely easy. The drawback is that since it's all runtime, and 
no compilation at all, it has no compile/time type checking. But this is 
easy to get used to.

> it uses a native compiler, it stands to reason that it would be faster than
> Java,

Uhm. No, it uses a bytecode compiler, just like Java. Java's is sligthly 
better optimized and therefore faster, although not significantly so in 
this case. Pythons bytecode compilr is "just-in-time" however, so you 
never need to compile anything, you just run it.

This in combination with the above dynamicism gives cool development 
features like automatic refresh of the Products. You change the code, 
and refresh the webpage, and your code is automatically recompiled, the 
old code thrown out and the new one sucked in. And you don't need to 
make one single compile command. This, together with Pythons clear and 
explicit structure and Zopes OODB storage makes development times very low.

> but what of it's objects and packages?  (i.e. Does it have an image
> manipulation package, or networking packages?)

Yes, and yes. The only package I am missing for Python is a platform 
independent MIDI-package.

> For those who want a couple of examples, I have 3 projects for our
> intranet/extranet/internet applications:
> 
> 1).  Images and cataloging (where, our development team can upload their
> images, and the intranet application will take that image and export it to a
> JPG to update the web catalog, and move the original file to our FTP site
> for our photographers.

Not a problem.

> 2).  Document Management (Uploading of files, and inputting data to index on
> those files for searching)

Easy with CMS products that are available like CPS and Plone, and maybe 
the others too.

> 3).  Obviously the usual (Content Management and Portals) which I'm sure
> Zope does a good job at.

Yup. :)

> Thanks in advance!!  Again, my apologies if there is a better list for this
> post.

Yeah, zope at zope.org is better, so I answer there instead of to zope-dev.

//Lennart