[Zope] Help Needed - Case for Zope

[Dylan Reinhardt]

At 10:14 PM 3/4/2003, J Cameron Cooper wrote:
>>I think showing Zope to be faster than Tomcat,
>>as the numbers indicate, will be difficult to support, especially since I
>>don't believe it myself.
>
>Although benchmarks are a very small part of the story as far as I'm 
>concerned, there is a need for such numbers.

Indeed.  Zope is a decent enough performer in benchmark testing and we 
should know where it stands.  But the real case for Zope is not its speed 
as a server, but its speed as a development platform.

You can increase performance speed easily enough... get faster hardware, a 
bigger pipe, more caching, a reverse proxy, do load balancing.  It doesn't 
take a heck of a lot to build a world-class service *around* Zope.

Where Zope shines is in time to market and ease of maintenance.  It's going 
to be tough to give a precise benchmark on how much faster it is to build 
something in Zope than it is in J2EE or Jboss.  But it is appreciably 
faster, perhaps by an order of magnitude.  Developer time and support 
resources just aren't things most shops can come up with as easily as cash 
for hardware.

The learning curve is shorter too.  If you're a moderately experienced 
developer, you can pick up 90% of Python in a day or two.  I've never heard 
that said about Java... at least not with a straight face.  :-)

Perhaps the best way to make a case for Zope is to prototype 
something.  Give yourself a little time to do some reading up front, but 
then just rip into something.  In many ways Zope is a 
gotta-see-it-to-believe-it proposition.  Lots of platforms claim to make 
things easy... but the proof is in doing something nontrivial.  In the time 
it takes to evaluate Zope and measure it against other platforms you could 
almost be done with a rough prototype of your system.

HTH,

Dylan