Zope Creator (Jim Fulton) Speaks To Zopera.org

Olivier DECKMYN writes: "Zopera team, representing the community of french speaking Zope users have made a community Interview of Jim Fulton, the brain behind Zope. Jim explains origins and future of Zope, business of Zope Corp., and delivers informations about the fantastic upcoming Zope 3... Zope is a revolutionnary Open-Source internet application server, written in Python."

Phabric = Zope on Java

[ryarger]

As a *huge* fan of Zope, I want to make sure everyone also knows about the Phabric project. www.phabric.org [phabric.org]. This is an attempt to get Zope running without modification using Jython, which is a Java implementation of Jython.

The project is close to being runnable, and may even be usable with some work. So if you're interested, check it out!

Re:Phabric = Zope on Java

[RevAaron]

But why would you want to do that? I can see the purpose of Jython in and of itself, but why Phabric? It's not like this would allow Python/Zope in places where Java is required, like is often the argument for Jython. If your boss is letting you use Phabric for some app, I'd assume she'd let you use real Zope with real Python.

Zope is cool...

[costas]

... but if you are a control freak (like myself), Zope can be too constraining. On the other hand, Webware for Python [sf.net] provides a clean, very OOPy, servlet server written entirely in Python. It's not necessarily better than Zope (Zope is by far more mature) but it does offer you more control over your app.

Re:Right... Non-Trollish question here

[DrSkwid]

What can Zope do that PHP cannot? Or Perl for that matter? Or even ASP?

essentially nothing, in the same way you cannot do anything I cannot do

Zope...

[Big Sean O]

What can Zope do that PHP cannot? Or Perl for that matter? Or even ASP?

It's not a matter of what it can't do, it's a matter of how it is done. Zope helps me (the solo programmer) by enforceing separation of presentation and logic. It would also be good for teams where duties are split between content, design, and logic.

About a week ago I started a new web project using python scripts for its cgi. I wasn't spending a lot of time writing the business logic because I was spending a lot of time writing the code that displays HTML.

Now, I'm a one-man operation, not a professional programmer, and also a pathetically poor coder, so progress was painful and slow.

I investigated Zope and discovered that someone else had done the boring part and made a pretty robust platform for me to develop my application.

After a brief intermission where I read the on-line Zope Book, called strangely enough "The Zope Book" [zope.org] I managed to get my ideas working.

It's a benefit for me, because I can write smaller, more modular logic code (which I might actually get right), and I don't have to worry about writing a bunch of HTML-generating code that (a) would be boring, and (b) would be buggy.

Teams will be able to use Zope effectively too, since you can separate logic, design, and content and enforce it by only giving certain users access to their parts.

Zope is a server, and the files and directory you store data in is not part of the regular filesystem. I have some problems with the web interface, especially over the Internet, but most of my concerns go away when I run it on the localhost. You can ftp to the server using emacs and edit the files remotely in the usual way.

Also, I find that the documentation is pretty good, but they are in desperate need of a Zope Cookbook.

Re:Zope...

[platypus]

Also, I find that the documentation is pretty good, but they are in desperate need of a Zope Cookbook.
Do you know about [zopelabs.com]
http://www.zopelabs.com/cookbook?

I did not...

[Big Sean O]

I do now...

Thank you.

I might give Zope a try

[brenfern]

I've been hearing a lot of good things about Zope and am considering giving it a try; I would be interested to hear some real-life case studies discussing any potential pitfalls with using Zope. I usually develop dynamic sites using servlets/JSP/Mysql as I generally like the flexibility I get, but this time I need to set up a prototype quickly (2-3 days) and pass on the development wholly to somebody who has only modest web development experience. Would Zope be useful in this situation, or would we hit brick walls too soon? The initial requirements are:

• Bulletin boards with searching and querying
  
• Dynamic news pages
  
• User-definable home pages
  

Later on we would require e-commerce and so on. Any real-life developer experiences would be useful to hear of; I have had a look at a few sites that use Zope and they seem ok.

Re:I might give Zope a try

[cow ninja]

Bulletin boards with searching and querying
Dynamic news pages
User-definable home pages

Don't only look at Zope but some of the addons. Squishdot [squishdot.org] may handle the Bulletin board and news pages. Most of your work may already be done.

I developed a helpdesk call logger and resources page in a day using Zope.

Thanks - Wow !!!

[brenfern]

Cheers for the advice - I have literally in the last half hour downloaded Zope for the first time ever, installed it, installed Squishdot and created a test site.

For all the talk of many other CMS I have yet to see anything as instantly usable as this. Perhaps I will reach the limit of this as I do with many other frameworks, but it's looking good so far for what I want to acheive....

Would you share that work?

[Futurepower(tm)]

"I developed a helpdesk call logger and resources page in a day using Zope."

Would it be acceptable to you to share that work? It sounds close to what I need.

www.freezope.org

[Moderation abuser]

Give them an email address, they'll give you a free Zope instance to play with. It takes a couple of hours to get your head round how it works and what you should and shouldn't be trying to do.

BTW, can I just say that Zope absolutely rocks as an web application development platform. It's just sooo[1] much faster than "traditional" methods of web development.

[1] Where "sooo" represents a large number.

Smalltalk

[RevAaron]

Heh. On the Squeak mailing list, there have been cracks about how Zope is essentially trying to make themselves a bloated implementation of Smalltalk out of Python. This interview makes it a lot clearer that may be precisely the case. :)