[Zope] Re: [Zope-dev] help me convert from j2ee to zope

[Ryan Boder]

On Sat, Jan 24, 2004 at 04:28:24PM +0100, Clemens Robbenhaar wrote:
>  I am not certain if this is the right mailing list here, because
> zope-dev is for the development _of_ Zope, not the development of
> products _with_ Zope.

It's not. The thread has moved to zope at zope.org.


>  Usually You should have some persistent object around by the Zope
> framework when handling request. If doing an XML-RPC call You are already
> talking to some persistent object given to You by the ZPublisher. I am
> not sure what is the appropriate equivalent of a session bean in J2EE if
> looking at Zope.

Not knowing much about Zope, I would assume that a session bean is similar
to a non-persistent Zope product, while an entity bean is similar to a
persistent Zope product.

>From what I have read about Zope, J2EE and Zope offer very similar services
to developers. Straight from the Oreilly EJB book, EJB offers: concurrency,
transactions, persistence, distributed objects (RPC), naming, and role based
security. From what I have read Zope offers these same services to products.

At first glance it seems like I should be able to just re-implement my EJBs
as Zope products and it would work out quite well. Although the Zope
developers have said otherwise so I'm not sure.

Also I have noticed other similarities (keep in mind I am a Zope novice, so
don't take this as fact):
JSP == ZPT
Servlets == script (python) objects

I can only see 2 BIG differences in Zope and J2EE...

1. Java vs Python (I like Python better) 
2. Zope is much nicer and easier to develop in than J2EE. It seems like the
Zope designers actually tried to make things easy for developers, where the
J2EE designers did not. (Or if they did, failed miserably)

My only real reservation is that Zope seems very stuck on making everything
a web interface. Personally I don't like web interfaces for most things. I
would like to write my programs so that they use the XML-RPC publishing and
integrate my client programs with user programs such as eclipse and
openoffice.org. For example, one thing I am working on is a requirements
management system that stores the data in an application server (hopefully
Zope) but the users write their requirements documents in openoffice and
openoffice interacts with the app server to store the requirements. I want
the main user interface to be openoffice for that, not the web. The web
interface would probably just be a read-only view for people who won't
download openoffice. Is something like that reasonable in Zope? Because I do
think the services mentioned above like transactions and security will be
very useful in a product like this.


>  Another source of inspiration is to install products which seem to do
> something similar what You want and try to figure out how they did it.
> (I personally prefer Silva for rather obvious reasons ;) 

That's the route I'm going, but it does take time to figure out how other
people's code works, especially when I'm still learning the Zope framework.


-- 
Ryan Boder
http://www.bitwiser.org/icanoop