[Zope] Zope2 - pro/contra

[Sebastian Tänzer]

I do share some of the point of views, especially in regards to bad marketing about Zopes future versions and lack of documentation. I don't share the criticism on ZPT/TAL - actually I love Page Templates and the approach to templating it brought to the web world. Chameleon is one of my favourite templating engines around.

Descriping Zope as mature is what I think fits best at the moment. Personally, I don't think Zope2 and a limited set of quite good Products is anywhere near dying - it's just not widely spread in the media but still I happen to come across many projects that work with the ZMS CMS for example where you don't expect it. 

My practical experience at least for the last 2-3 years was extremely positive about Zope2. We did not have any project where Zope2 was not able to do what was needed and do it well, too. Even some external coders were surprised about the flexiblity and extensibility.

I'm not saying Zope2 and especially ZMS (which is our primary CMS products beeing used) fits every project, but we never ran into any trouble and weren't able to do the job. I did do some jobs with Pyramid and the development time and performance was (at least with our limited projects) about the same.

Btw, we never really used neither the ZMI nor the TTWE functions really (close to never at all). For the last years we're working with our own Cocoa+python based MacOS app that uses WebDAV + FTP for local syncing and things like compass/sass integration. This is insanely fast despite the protocols (and thanks to local development setups and SSDs nowadays) and made us almost forget we're working inside the ZODB and not the local file system in the end. Using sockets we also sync down remote changes inside ZOPE locally almost instantly. It's a little bit like a FTP client on steriods ;-)

Thank you all for your opinions and the open discussion. It's nice to hear about other people still using it in production despite its reputation ;-)

Best
Sebastian