[Zope] Should I go with Zope?

[J. Atwood]

Hi Eric,

I just went through this process with my company so I will try to answer
your questions.

1) Digital Creations does offer support. There is also, as you can tell,
tons and tons of support through lists and websites. You might be able to
buy M$ support for $250 an hour but will you get the right answer back in 10
minutes via email? The Zope community is growing very rapidly (take a look
at the amount of job posting for Zope and Python people) and as that happens
user and community support will get even better.

1.1) One way to do this is to "Zope" part of your site and leave the rest as
Apache with all your Perl goodies. I will warn you that once you discover
the Zen of Zope you will drop Perl like a bad habit.

2) There are tons of ways to back up Zope. Since the data is stored in one
file you can back up that file or you can back up the products and methods
you are writing by exporting them. In the end, Zope is just an application
with data and can be backed up as such (tape, tar, ftp, etc).

3) This depends on hardware (When I started I asked this question A LOT!).
Zope.org serves around 13,000 hits an hour (over 2,000,000 a month) off of a
450 MHz Pentium. I have been building my site on 300 MHz Pentium with 256 MB
Ram and it flies (about 3 to 4 times faster than our NT + ASP hosted
machine). Apache + Raw HTML will always be faster but Zope really is
naturally fast and can be boosted by putting a small amount of hardware
behind it. After running a few test I figure I can handle about 10-30 page
accesses a second on my current hardware. This is running Zope as a
standalone server (very fast) with a database in the back.

3.1) Zope installed on Linux is very reliable. I have been developing a
large amount of Zope Web Applications all with PostGreSQL backend and have
never brought down Zope or the machine. I do, however continue to try! :)

Hope that helps...
JMA



> We are starting a new web application
> project and are looking for a stable, scalable
> platform that will be around and popular/supported for
> a long time. However, my business partner has brought
> up some really good questions about our becoming
> Zope-centric. These are questions that I don't have
> answers for and was hoping that some of you might be
> able to
> answer. 
> 
> 1. It appears that Zope offers little or no support
> for more tried and true technologies such as Perl and
> basic CGI. Is this the case? How does one interface
> with our existing Perl and C++ CGI's?
> 
> 2. With no basic HTML back up, what if Zope goes
> down?
> 
> 3. What is the limit of traffic Zope can serve at
> once? Can users access the applications reliably,
> repeatedly?
> 
> As our 2 week free trial is coming to an end, we need
> to make a decision about whether to stick with Zope or
> go with a more universally accepted technology. If
> you would, please let me know what you think about
> these issues.
> 
> Thanks!!
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