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

[Tres Seaver]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Marcelo de Moraes Serpa wrote:
> 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?

Thanks very much for the insight into Zope's stregths and weaknesses as
seen by one coming from the Rails world.  I know that lots of folks in
Zopeland envy the Rails folks for their success at attracting
developers:  at one point, Zope was doing for Python what Rails has been
doing more reccently for Ruby.

The Grok folks (http://grok.zope.org/) have made efforts to make a
Zope-based development experience which draws on soem of the Rails
memes:  "don't repeat yourself", "conventiion over configuration", etc.
 I find those memes problematic, myself, for some of the same reasons
you point out for Rails.


Tres.
- --
===================================================================
Tres Seaver          +1 540-429-0999          tseaver at palladion.com
Palladion Software   "Excellence by Design"    http://palladion.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org

iD8DBQFHwaqG+gerLs4ltQ4RAoCqAKCivoVCHYoVNHcIEzM7xpoDKrd3QACgtPtX
AcWg/oDEJbqVOrCQjgcKdA0=
=GAAr
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----