Zope comparisons? (ASP, PHP, etc)

[jchan at cohocanoes.com]

Wow...this is by far one of the best explainations of what Zope is capable 
of doing. Wonderful description, Evan. Perhaps your prose should be        
incorporated into Zope's site.

Evan Simpson <evan at tokenexchange.com> wrote:
> 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 :-)