[Zope] exploratory questions

[J Cameron Cooper]

>
>
>My site has several hundred registered users, and potentially it could
>have many thousand.  Is it practical and manageable to handle access
>control programmatically (assuming user info - usernames, passwords,
>etc.) are stored in a Postgres db)?
>
I'm not sure what you mean. (Possibly a Java/Zope concept mismatch 
here.) If you mean "is it reasonable to authenticate a few thousand 
users against a Postgres database from Zope?" the answer is 'yes'. That 
many users is peanuts, but even if you chose a really big number, 
there's no serious problem I've run against.

How? Take a look at SimpleUserFolder or XUF:

http://www.zope.org/Members/TheJester/exUserFolder
http://www.zope.org/Members/NIP/SimpleUserFolder

Both should be fine authenticating against a database.

>Is there a database pooling mechanism for Zope+PostgreSQL?
>
You'll have to check the requisite database adapters. Psycopg at least 
does aggressive connection pooling, and I'll bet any similarly developed 
DA will too.

http://www.zope.org/Members/fog/psycopg
http://www.zope.org/Members/tm/ZPoPyDA/
http://www.zope.org/Members/reedstrm/ZPyGreSQLDA-rjr

>Does anyone have any comments about Zope performance as compared to
>Tomcat/Java? Any caveats?
>  
>
For display of simple pages, a servlet/JSP engine will generally beat 
Zope, since such pages are generally static to Java, but not to Zope. I 
haven't yet benchmarked some more complex circumstances. My guess is 
that Zope will be better at more complex tasks, but it's just a guess 
until I get around to some better test cases.

http://zopeedge.com/benchmarks

             --jcc