Zope Gives Java Competition
"I've used all kinds of platforms, and I fell in love with Zope," says veteran programmer Stephen Bartlett, who runs Bartlett Software, a boutique development house near Santa Barbara, Calif. "It's a natural environment for doing fairly sophisticated server-side Web sites."
He and other programmers say Zope's advantages over Java are in the cost and time to deployment. "Python is a simpler language than Java, so it's easier to put together sites with dynamic content," he says. "The initial ramp-up time is shorter because the content-management framework that runs on top of it makes it so customizable."
Bartlett says he convinced his client Change Companion, a business-process-management applications developer, to switch its Web site from Java to Zope, a task he completed in about five months. "I was able to quickly re-engineer the client from a Java-based system, and I convinced them to use Zope for the next phase of their Web-site deployment," Bartlett says. "It wasn't a hard sell because they'd invested so much in Java and wound up with something not all that usable."
According to the Zope.org Web site, a clearinghouse of information on the platform, Zope runs on a transactional object database, which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, relational-database connections and code.
Zope has a "through-the-Web" development model that enables Web-site updates from anywhere in the world--a process enabled by an integrated security model that allows the site owner to delegate control over parts of a Web site to other organizations or individuals.
If Zope has a glaring drawback, it's a relative lack of support documentation. Bryant Cobarrubias--a programmer who deployed Zope when he ran Crew Solutions, a development house in Chicago--echoes Bartlett's comments on the protocol's ease of use, but says he didn't use the support as much because it simply isn't readily available. "I'd like to see them improve the documentation with more information on the Zope Web site," he says. "You have to do a lot of hunting to find what you need."
Bartlett agrees, saying that the documentation that exists is useful but sparse. "That's the biggest downside, but I guess it just means the developers want to spend more time developing it and less time writing about it," he says.
Luc Hatlestad is senior writer at VARBusiness.
Zope Resources
dev.zope.org A centralized site for Zope developers.
cmf.zope.org The CMF Dogbowl, for developers of Zope's content-management framework.
collector.zope.org/Zope URL for reporting Zope bugs and other issues.
www.zopezen.org/ www.zopelabs.com/ and www.zopenewbies.net/ Zope news and discussion sites.
www.zopemag.com An online 'zine featuring articles, interviews and product reviews.
www.nipltd.net/Free A free hosting server for Zope developers.
www.python.org The Python programming-language site.