[Zope3-Users] beginning orientation

[Martin Blais]

hello,

i'm new to zope, currently trying to learn as much as i can from it,
in order to investigate whether to use it for a new project (rather
than go the cgi+sql way).  i read the zope3 developer's book, it seems
really well-done, but i have a few concerns and questions:

1. it would be nice if there was a section/chapter on debugging problems.

2. it would be nice if there was section that described the syntax of
queries to the server?  I noticed URL someitmes have a
..../@@page.html -like syntax, but changing the urls i manage to get
pages without that.  i couldn't find a section that explains how this
works.  i'm not familiar with zope2, perhaps this is something taht is
in the docs for zope2...

3. normally i'd use an SQL database or files to store data, but I
understand that zope includes an object database.  i suppose a trivial
way to think about this would be to create classes and then each
"database row" would correspond to an object instance stored in a
folder (itself corresponding to an SQL table).

will this allow me to run offline processes accessing the data as I
would an SQL database, say iterating over the object instances and
then modifying some data in these objects?  is this efficient
comparing to a typical MySQL setup?  where can i find out more about
how to go about this?

4. i understand that many of the zope devs are also plone devs.  is
there an alpha/in-the-works version of plone for zope3?  if not, how
much work would it be to implement per-user profile information and
email-verification registration procedure?  i would be willing to
contribute code if i decide to work on this thing  (at this point i'm
not sure that coding my stuff by hand would take less time)

thx for any pointer, i'm a bit lost in the sea of zope concepts...