[Zope] Legacy Perl code and Zope. A pipe dream?

[Lennart Regebro]

On 10/3/06, Derek Basch <dbasch at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Perhaps refactor wasn't the best choice of words. The site is a very large online gaming website
> (not gambling). The legacy perl code does many, many things (administration, game play,
> accounting, message boards, publishing, mail, etc...) and really is around a million lines.
> Rewriting the current perl code in python/zope would take a small eternity even with the rapid
> development that zope permits.

Well, you don't need to rewrite most of it, as Zope handles some of
this already, and there are products for some of the rest.

But yes. It would be a lerge project, of course.

> I saw that the zope-perl project is virtually dead and was hoping that some magical zope to perl
> bridge existed. Something that would allow me to use our existing perl code as an external method
> or someting similar.

Well, that wouldn't help you. You would then still have one million
lines of perl code/crap, just wrapped in a Zope layer.

> Which way should I go?

Hard to say. If the Perl code was NOT spaghetti-code (is there Perl
code that is not) then a perl framework would probably have been the
natural way to go. Now I don't even know if that would help you,
because that assumes you can extract relevant parts from you current
app and reuse them. And if you can, well, then it's not spaghetti. :)

If it really is spaghetti, you'll end up rewriting everything anyway.
Install something like CPS and Plone and look at Plones third-party
products, and you'll get a feeling for how much you really need to
write from scratch. There's a lot out there.

-- 
Lennart Regebro, Nuxeo     http://www.nuxeo.com/
CPS Content Management     http://www.cps-project.org/