[Zope] PHP vs. Zope/Plone? Which better overall and for what?

[Ausum Studio]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <seberino at spawar.navy.mil>


> I don't know much about web stuff.
>
> I can see amazing power in Zope and thought PHP was just
> for quick and easy little projects.
>
> However, I keep hearing about more and more big beefy
> web projects and companies using PHP.
>
> Without starting a flame war, is there a chance in future
> the power AND ease of PHP may win out over Zope?  Does
> Zope's architecture have some killer features that PHP
> can never copy?

That's a good question. Telling by the number of developers and web
applications already written for it (and also in the works), it looks like
PHP has already won the preference of the majority of developers doing web
apps. Nonetheless it doesn't mean that PHP based development is more
efficient than with Python. In fact it isn't.

Zope's niche in my opinion is not the 'generic apps' market, but the
customized applications. I call a 'generic app' a common one like a weblog,
a photo album, an even a generic portal that everyone can have (Plone). PHP
followers do that stuff all the time, just for the fun, with interesting
levels of cleverness and sophistication (just take a  look at Sourceforge or
opensourcecms.com). The key aspect of Zope is that, due to it is a framework
explicitly conceived for web development, you can build custom applications
faster than with PHP. And faster means also that you can take any generic
app already written in Zope, and modify it in less time than it would take
to do the same with a PHP app.

Yes Zope has many many killer features PHP doesn't have (it is a framework
while PHP is just a language to say the least), but you've mentioned the
steep learning curve, and that means you've already found the reason why
PHP-MySQL is more popular than Zope. Zope is not just for the fun. It's for
serious high-end web application development.


Ausum




> It seems Zope's steep learning curve is a showstopper for some.
>
> Please advise.
>
> Chris
> --
> _______________________________________
>
> Christian Seberino, Ph.D.
> SPAWAR Systems Center San Diego
> Code 2872
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>
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