Zope comparisons? (ASP, PHP, etc)

[Evan Simpson]

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the Zope mailing list
(zope at zope.org) about making this sort of information more readily available
on the website, but here's a brief intro:

Zope has several parts, which work well together, but are all optional:

1.  ZServer: A Medusa-based multi-threaded asynchronous server which accepts
HTTP, FTP, and monitor (special Python client) connections.  Usually, it
passes requests from these connections to...

2. ZPublisher:  An ORB which converts HTTP, FTP, XML-RPC, WebDAV, etc.
requests into traversal of an object hierarchy and returns the result of
rendering the target object.  These objects are normally stored in...

3. ZODB: A versioning, transaction-based object store with automatic object
persistence and conflict handling.  ZODB stores an object hierarchy as a
single file (2GB limit being worked on) and appends new versions of objects
when their request transaction is comitted.  This allows extensive undo, and
requires occasional packing to eliminate old, unwanted versions.  Most HTML
is generated by standard Zope objects using...

4. DTML: An embedded language similar to ASP and PHP, except that
expressions are written in Python and have access to the full power of the
rest of Zope, including...

5. Acquisition: A feature of standard Zope objects which allows them to
change their behavior automatically based on the context in which they are
called.  Hard to describe, but very powerful, as are...

6. Products: New objects or collections of objects can be added to Zope by
simply installing a Python package in the Products subdirectory and
resetting the server.  Current Products include database adapters, threaded
discussions, virtual host managers, and many others.  Of course, if you
don't want to learn Python you can always create...

7. ZClasses: Object classes defined through the web management interface by
assembling standard Zope parts.  These can provide a wide range of
customized objects.

I haven't really gotten into the user/role/permission security model, or the
extensive web management interface through which you typically interact with
Zope.  I may have forgotten other bits, too.  There's a lot there :-)

Charlie Hubbard <charliehubbard76 at yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3821C5F6.84543AF2 at yahoo.com...
> I'm looking for some comparison info about zope.  Why zope?
> How is it different, the same, or better than ASP, PHP, or
> DHTML?  I've looked over some different docs on zope.org,
> but I wasn't able to find any info about what need zope fills.
> What can you do with zope that you can't do with ASP or PHP?
> It seems zope is based off of an object model where PHP and
> ASP are simplying server side scripting languages.  Does zope
> fill that need?  Is it in competition with this languages?  Would
> there be any reason to use Zope with ASP or PHP?