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

[Kirk Strauser]

On Wednesday 15 December 2004 17:40, seberino at spawar.navy.mil wrote:

> However, I keep hearing about more and more big beefy
> web projects and companies using PHP.

I also recently visited a client who had a copy of "Writing Web Applications 
in RPG" on his desk, but I wouldn't necessarily want to do it.

I would not personally ever develop a large web app in PHP, for much the 
same reason that I wouldn't develop a large client-side app in C.  Both are 
clearly possible, but I firmly believe that much better alternatives exist 
now.

> Without starting a flame war, is there a chance in future
> the power AND ease of PHP may win out over Zope?

Absolutely zero.  As long as Zope is still maintained, it hasn't "lost".

I've written a *lot* of my company's application stack in Python.  Using 
Zope was kind of a no-brainer, since I can call the exact same methods from 
within Zope as from my other clients.  There's basically no support for PHP 
outside of the web environment; although there's a command-line interpreter 
for it, I've literally never once seen it used.

> It seems Zope's steep learning curve is a showstopper for some.

It's steep, true, but also very short.  It took me a little while to stop 
fighting its design (I'd most recently written PHP before I discovered Zope 
and kept wanting to develop Zope in the same way I'd written PHP), but once 
I did, the payoff was immediate and enormous.
-- 
Kirk Strauser
The Day Companies