[Zope] Social Networking over Zope

[Marc Burgauer]

Hi Pablo

We are using Zope for community web sites (for an example have a look at
http://www.theguidlife.net).

We have chosen to split the data into 2 types. We us PostgreSQL (ultimately
favoured over MySQL, but really depends on your architecture - we have lots
of data processing happening within the RDBMS and we use some Object
Relational features of Postgres too) for text based data and use the ZODB
for all file uploads (images and other files people want to add to their
content), as well as hierarchical data (e.g. Thesaurus like reference
systems). (BTW. We use Zpyscopg as database adapter.)

We are also looking into using Apache or Squid for "reverse proxy" features
to help handling load.

In general, I believe that the ZODB scales better than relational RDBMS
systems, but having data in SQL allows us to make it available to different
applications (even to PHP if we must). We use exUserFolder for
authentication and have bolted on our own membership module.

I have done 5+ years of PHP prior to Zope and there is just no comparison.
Simply said, PHP has an easier entry path then Zope (I do now Zope for 3
years and still feel "newbie" to it, while I felt "pro" with PHP after a
year). We chose Zope when we were faced with implementing real user and
access management in PHP (access control lists were required). At the time,
in PHP it simply was impossible to do in the given time and in Zope, you get
it for free. One of the new additions to our team has done ASP.NET for 3
years and for the first few weeks, there was not a single day where he was
not telling me "I never knew how easy this stuff could be".

So my theory is that people do not chose Zope more often, because initially
the learning curve is steep. At the surface, Zope also lacks the level of
documentation that PHP seems to have (e.g. Count the number of books on
Amazon). But I found the Zope crowd to be much more knowledgeable when it
comes to find solutions for difficult problems. So you find often better
answers, if you do your research properly.

Cheers

Marc


On 25/8/04 7:16 pm, "Pablo Ziliani" <pablo at decode.com.ar> wrote:

> Hi all,
> I have recently been asked to build a social network site. My first
> thought was to implement it on Zope, but I'm a little bit worried about
> concurrency and scalability. Having such a site access continuously to
> the database, I guess its caching possibilities are very low.
> Anyway, what I really looking for is some advice. Anybody here to share
> his/her thoughts? Any past experience? Why is that most social networks
> are built over ASP.NET or PHP?
> 
> Thanks in advance, a lot.
> Pablo
> 
> PS: I still have to convince my client, so...
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