[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope3 as a "generic" application server

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Iwan,

> At the moment the focal point for development projects at my company is 
> either Java/JBoss or C#/DOT.NET. I'm hoping to add Zope2 to this list 
> for web-specific/CMS related endavours. Without getting into a silly 
> struggle about definitions and comparissons ("my app server is 
> bigger/better than yours"),  I would like to pose the following 
> question:  do Zope Corporation and the alligned Community intend to 
> position Zope3 as a "generic" application server or will it, like its 
> predecessor, mainly be used as a web application server.

Zope3 aims to be something more general than just a web application 
server, although its orientation towards the web is undoubtable. Still, 
the component architecture allows anyone to write views for a specific 
user interface or network protocol. With the current view service, this 
has to be request based, but so are most protocols these days (or at 
least they can be adapted to be so).

I personally would like to see Zope3 handle SMTP, IMAP, LDAP etc. at 
some point. People have talked about connecting twisted to Zope3. This 
move should allow us to do crazy things like that.

> My personal view of such an app server would be a application which 
> provides the developer with for example:
> * component based architecture

Zope3 is all based on it.

> * integrated fault-tolerance/scalability facilities (ie 
> load-balancing/clustering)

See ZEO.

> * network centric architecture which can support multiple protcols

We've got HTTP, FTP, WebDAV, XML-RPC already.

> * multiple client-tier servives like web-presentation tiers, but also 
> for example SOAP web services

Not sure what you mean here.

> * Transaction monitoring
> * RDBMS backed object persistence framework

Got it (SQLObject).

> over the top you can intepret my question to be: "is Zope3 going to be 
> like JBoss, but then written in/for Python (and pleasurable to work with 

I thought you didn't want to hear comparisons like "Our application 
server is better"... :)

Philipp