[Zope] Re: MOO vs Zope

[John Maxwell]

Terry Hancock wrote:

> In my research of online collaborative systems I frequently
> see references to MOO or MUD based systems.  After some
> reading on the subject, it seems to me that the Zope OFS
> could be considered a MOO -- or at least very much like
> one.
>
> What (if anything) would a MOO server system be more adept
> than a Zope server at?  And would it be logical to emulate
> MOO-based technologies using Zope OFS as the database?

Here's my two cents on this topic, just because MOO and Zope are the 
two coolest environments I've used in the past decade. What follows is 
probably not going to win any technical merit awards:

At some abstract level, the MOO server and the Zope server can be 
considered equivalent, because they're both OO systems (both as 
databases and as message-handling servers). At this level, anything 
sufficiently OO would qualify -- you ought to try out a similar query 
over on the Squeak-Smalltalk list, where they also have totally 
OO-based web/netservers.

The real difference is that MOO and Zope have been specialized for 
different kinds of tasks: Zope gives you the scaffolding of an object 
model that makes ton of sense for a "webmaster" kind of approach. MOO 
gave you an object model specialized for 'location'-specific real-time 
interaction. The extent to which these two systems have been 
specialized to different ends means they would in practice suck at each 
other's tasks. I remember in the mid-90s there were lots of projects 
trying to get the MOOserver to serve webpages, and it was a simple 
enough thing to do, conceptually (you pretend the browser is a 'player' 
and deal with it conversationally). But is sucked in practice, for 
reasons of speed and, to a certain extent, conceptual clarity: the 
metaphor only went so far before getting in the way.

My expectation is that trying to get Zope to work as a real-time server 
would be similarly frustrating, just because you'd be working against 
the main current of what it has evolved into.

The conceptual overlap in them that you point out here, though, is a 
very neat intellectual space, and I'd suggest you look into Squeak and 
Smalltalk, the current manifestation of the common ancestor of both MOO 
and Zope. Squeak is still green enough to be bent in pretty much any 
direction, so if you've got ideas about novel communications models, 
it's probably a more fruitful environment, just by virtue of having 
less of an established set of practices governing its trajectory.

  - John Maxwell
    http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/People/jmax
    jmax at sfu.ca