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

[Phillip Hutchings]

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 11:50:05 -0600, Kirk Strauser <kirk at daycos.com> wrote:
> 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.

I do that at work, a huge PHP app. It's a maintenance nightmare.

> 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.

I have. I've written an IRC bot in CLI php ;) There's also GTK PHP,
but it's not designed for it - Python remains far more structured and
far easier to maintain.

> 
> > 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.

I tried learning Zope once and failed. Then I sat down and worked
through the Zope book, and it made it much easier.

-- 
Phillip Hutchings
http://www.sitharus.com/
sitharus at gmail.com / sitharus at sitharus.com