[Zope] Zope 3 and Rails - a pragmatic and agile comparation (put the hype aside)

[Marcelo de Moraes Serpa]

Hello,

I come from a Rails background, been working with Rails for about 1 year and
a half, it has been a great experience but my last project required me to
use Plone as a base framework for the portal/application.

I then started deeply studying Plone 3. Bought and read Martin's excellent
book Professional Plone Development from cover to cover. Struggled with Zope
concepts but almost always could grasp them by reading the other books from
the Zope/Plone bookshelf or online articles/tutorials.

It has been 3 months already. The project is almost done and I've learned to
like Plone and Zope 2. However, what attracted me the most was Zope 3 and
its elegant concepts and OOP patterns and this led me to question some
things:

 * The differences in the approaches taken by Rails and Zope 3 to provide
developer productivity, scalability and application maintability.
Rails is productive, no doubt regarding this. However, I feel that it
restricts me in the OOP side of things, hiding much of the OOP patterns from
the developer. The "put there it will just work" philosophy often makes it
hard (at least harder than if it were being implemented on Zope 3) to make
more advanced, complex and specific things.

I do believe in the agile methodology and I always follow it whatever I am
working with Java, python, C or Rails. Rails just happens to be an
out-of-the-box solution that has attract millions of developers becouse of
its magic promises and easy learning-curve.

I feel however, that Zope 3 with its Component Architecture is much more
elegant and can be as productive as Rails AND provide better application
scalability and maintability than Rails if you know what you are doing.

I can't speak for Zope 2 though :)

What do you think? Would you mind sharing your experiences and ideas
regarding this subject?

Cheers,

Marcelo.
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