Zope vs PHP for the Linux guru

[Paul Winkler]

On Fri, 5 Oct 2001 09:03:40 +1000, Richard Jones 
<richard at bizarsoftware.com.au> wrote:
>On Friday 05 October 2001 08:24, Cameron Laird wrote:
>> Zope development is breathtakingly swift--in the hands
>> of an expert.  As wonderful as Zope is, though, it's
>> hard to make a case that it's easy to learn.  It's pro-
>> bably the case that it lacks just the right bit of
>> documentation, or examples, or something; in any case,
>> newcomers consistently report rather extended intervals
>> before they "get" the Zope way of working.
>
>The new Zope Book (freely downloadable) is a really good effort to remedy 
>this.

... although (probably due to timing) it doesn't cover Page Templates
which are very, very cool - probably much better in the long run than
Zope's other (older) template language, DTML, and with important
advantages over just about every other dynamic web system out there.
There's a good introduction to ZPT linked from the front page of
zope.org this week: http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/ZPT3

IMHO, a lot of the difficulty of grokking Zope is understanding what
the different parts of Zope are and how they relate to each other.

1) the through-the-web management interface, the ZMI.

2) the filesystem-like view that ZMI provides of objects in the Zope
database, the ZODB.

3) calling object methods by URL

4) page templating languages, DTML and ZPT. In practice, you'll need
to know a little python here too.

5) Acquisition, the process by which objects in the ZODB can
search in their parent Folders for other objects.

6) the security system

7) extensions written in python, which live on the
filesystem, either as small External Methods or as possibly quite
large Products.

8) extensions written as ZClasses

9) the ZCatalog

... for starters. :)

All of these things play their part in zope, and you will need at the
very least a working understanding of 1 - 6; anything non-trivial will
require Products or ZClasses too. And any site that needs searching
will need ZCatalog.

>> It does NOT support "Web server farming" of the sort
>> I suspect you have in mind, though.  There's no parti-
>> cular reason it doesn't (and maybe someone's fixed
>> this recently); it's just that no one's gone to the
>> trouble of making it a reality.
>
>I'm not sure of the specifics, but doesn't ZEO handle this?

This might make interesting reading:
http://www.zope.org/About


--Paul Winkler