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Programmers and users are the same people.

They may be the same but not necessarily.

Corporations are not people at all, and dislike copylefts and share-alikes

True, corporations are not people. I have ranted a number of tymes on /. about corporations myself. However not all corporations dislike copyleft or share-alikes. Redhat is a corporation that lives and breaths on open source. Zope is another one as are others.

GPL is better for everyone but big corporations.

Again I'll cut and paste from a reply to a post above yours:

I hope to start a photography business and because I'm on disability and don't work I won't be able to afford all the commercial software to run a photography business. What I've been planning on doing was search for BSD licensed source code for various tasks then create a shell from which they can all be run. As an example, say I'm editing a photo. Once I finish editing I could then record the photo in a database and generate a bill for the client, all from one interface instead of having to launch each application separately.

Now I don't know how long it would take but I imagine it would be a long tyme. So then I thought that maybe I'd sell the package to other photographers. However because of the effort I put into it I wouldn't want someone who bought it from me to be able to turn around and copy then sell it, or give it away, themselves. I've had some /.ers say I could sell support, sure I could but that would mean I'd be working as support when I want to be a photographer and selling software I wrote would generate a second source of income. In today's economy too many people have to have second jobs to make ends meet, while congress is bailing out large businesses it's not helping average Joes. I'd better stop there.

but it makes the whole project and the community of its users vulnerable to E3 attacks (embrace-extend-extinguish).

If at any tyme I want to I can release all source code into the wild. In which case it's no more vulnerable that GPL code.

And LGPL is better than BSD whenever non-viral properties are desired.

I really don't know anything about the LGPL other than some libraries use it.

Falcon

Thee Python jobs can be found here...

BTW, if you know Python and Zope really well, and are willing to move to Fredericksburg, Virginia, there are several jobs here: http://www.zope.com/Corporate/Careers.html.

http://www.zope.com/Customers.html
http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZopePowered/

"Is it compiled into native code? I know this is more a Python thing but even mentioning an application server built in a scripting language will have me ridiculed out the door."

You're saying you'll be ridiculed for proposing an application server using an interpreted language, because it supposedly can't keep up with a J2EE server?

Maybe Zope, Inc.'s customers disagree. Or photo.net, a site getting over 10,000,000 hits a day that's written in OpenACS, which is itself written totally in Tcl?

If you feel forced to keep using J2EE because you'll be ridiculed otherwise for using a "non-compiled" app server, go ahead. But other developers are likely gaining a lot of productivity by using more dynamic and "slower" interpreted languages. Check out this 22MB quicktime demo movie of the Ruby on Rails framework...pretty awesome stuff.

Linux Virtual Private Servers for Professionals

Furthermore, we are looking at content management systems for knowledge base solutions such as TikiWiki or egroupware.

Zope and Plone require a bit of a shift in thinking but I would add them to your short list. Zope provides a rather robust framework and Plone provides a rather well tested CMF solution with plenty of add-ons available. Plus you get the benefit of an open source solution with corporate support if you need it. Note that I have no affiliation with Zope other than I'm a happy user.

Anyone realized that the Zuse-Logo remarkably resembles that of Zope ?

CC.

You may be interested alos in looking at an example of how and why the developer of formerly famous PHP-based forum has moved (re-wrote) the whole thing to Plone.

Here are some Zope successfull stories from the real market.

My company is a large-market daily-US newspaper, and we are building CMS systems in Zope & Plone (using Python). There may be several advantages to using a scripting language, but a shift from Java to a non-OO scripting language like PHP is likely higher risk for you - Zope (and the Zope Content Management Framwork) may offer a better solution given it has a toolset of components to leverage out-of-the box, and a simple, component-oriented way of developing content management applications with a scripting language that is easier to use, but just as scalable as Java-based solutions.

Because it uses an object database for content repositories for digital asset management, you minimize the need to do object-relational serialization and marshalling between an OO system and a relational datastore. However, this isn't as complicated as it sounds; consider something like Archetypes, a schema-driven content type generation system that also has built-in relationship management for composition of media products from related assets.

Shameless plug: I'll be giving a talk on how we are doing much this at the Plone Conference. in October in New Orleans.

Scalability costs with this type of content-management solution will not be in licensing of yor apps, but in commodity hardware (scaling out). These costs would be greater than if you used something much more bare (i.e. PHP has no security model built-in, so pages might require less resources to render, but you get more limited flexibilty or need to implement such a layer anyway for your application, negating the performance difference), but performance and price would likely be on-par or more competitive than Java solutions.

If you are not in the market to build, but to buy the first 80% of your way into a solution, Zope Corporation has built a commercial CMS product on top of these open-source foundations (Zope/CMF, Squid+ESI) - it is called Zope4Media, initially developed for Viacom and Boston.com (one of the largest local media sites out there, which might speak for the performance characteristics of a well-designed Zope application).

Zope is a very cool web application system, and while I don't know of Guido's specific contributions I have to assume that they were great. Still, I'm confidant that Zope will carry on.

For those not familiar with Zope, it is a web application server written entirely in Python. It features an object database that, for example, lets you create an image object, and then call it from other code to automatically build your image tag based on the dimensions and title of the image stored in the object.

It's open source, developed both by the Zope community and the Zope corporation. There are at least two kick ass, open source content management systems built on top of Zope Corp's content management framework that I know of: Plone and Silva. There are a ton of add-on products that are downloadable too.

Zope does have a pretty steep learning curve, if you don't do stuff with "real" web applications (stuff that needs access control lists, user management, templating, etc) it might not be right for you, but it's great for bigger applications. Edd Dumbill talks in a recent blog entry about why Zope is worth learning and DevShed (which runs on Zope) has a good overview.

Guido and Dan Farmer are both smart guys and I'm sure that we can expect good things.

SleepyCat (Berkely DB)
Zope Corporation (Zope)
Covalent Technologies (Apache)
ActiveState

I deliberately haven't included Apple for reasons cited above, but Apple is almost as much a software company as it is a hardware company.

Heh, hehe, okay.

According to Bagley's site, we should all be using Ocaml anyway. Who knows, he may even be right...

In reference to the Bagley test, Java was more performant than Python, true. But Python won over Java on both memory and lines of code. Also, his tests, as all artificial benchmarks, are both accurate only for the point-in-time and are only accurate within the limits of the test conditions themselves. More recent versions of both Java and Python are faster. On top of that, special-purpose optimizations exist for both Java and Python if you really need that extra spurt of speed -- think Jikes or TowerJ for Java and Psyco for Python. More to the point, though, Java may be faster than Python, but it isn't faster by an order of magnitude. The difference in speed between them is not enough to worry about -- if you really need that much speed, you won't be programming in either Java *or* Python, you'll be coding in C and assembler. Your performance argument is irrelevant.

Your libraries argument is somewhat more compelling. However, you may not be aware that there are two major versions of Python, standard Python implemented in C and Jython, implemented in Java. Using Jython, you can write Python that has full access to all of Java's libraries.

On top of that, I'll make a very rough comparison between the various projects on Jakarta and extant Python libraries. I don't think I've seen anything like this, as Python has a poor record for collating their libraries and apps in one place, so the effort is worth it simply for educational purposes, if nothing else.

Disclaimer: I am not terribly familiar with most of these projects, and they have varying states of completeness and maturity. I merely aim to show that analogs of the various Jakarta projects do exist in the Python world. Please feel free to peruse them yourself and come to your own conclusions.

Jakarta Ant -- PyAnt , SCons

Alexandria -- I don't know of any comparable Python applications. However, the individual components of Alexandria (doc generation, CVS access, etc.) are available: check out HappyDoc , and various modules for use with the Zope application server, including CVSFile

Okay, now I'm going to lump together a bunch of Jakarta projects. Individual authors and users of these projects will inevitably scream, but my justification is that they are all web application servers of one sort or another. Their purposes are all the same. They have many differences in approach, philosophy, scope, and implementation, but at heart, they are all web application servers or web application server frameworks. Those projects are: Avalon, Jetspeed, Struts, Turbine, Velocity, Slide, and Tomcat itself. Oh, and I might as well throw James in here, too. Python web app servers and frameworks are equally numerous, and several are in advanced stages of maturity: again Zope, Twisted, Webware, Quixote, CherryPy, and SkunkWeb. There are more, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader. Google is your friend.

Lucene has no real counterpart in Python. David Mertz has put together a text indexer and search program, available at his site, but it looks small compared to Lucene. There is also something called WePaSe, but there is no information on it aside from its freshmeat release announcement.

Gump also has no counterpart. Cactus has an equivalent in WebUnit and PyUnit. Log4J's Python copy is called, naturally, Log4Py.

ORO and Regexp provide regular expressions for Java. Python has regular expressions built in to the standard library.

OJB provides an object-relational bridge for Java, similar in concept to Sun's JDO specification. Python counterparts are Modeling , PyDO, which is a subproject of the above-mentioned SkunkWeb, and MiddleKit, a subproject of WebWare.

ECS, JMeter, and POI have no Python counterparts. BSF also has no counterpart, since it embeds a scripting language in compiled Java. Perhaps its "counterpart" is Jython. Likewise, BCEL has no counterpart, nor does Watchdog.

Taglibs has no direct counterpart. Instead, Python has Spyce, Cheetah, PSP, and probably close to a dozen other implementations of the ASP/JSP theme, each with their own library of tags. Lack of a standard is perhaps not a good thing, but the existence of bunches of competing implementations is not a bad thing. Perhaps the most direct counterpart would be Zope's built-in technologies, DTML and ZPT. ZPT has also been built out into a standalone version, SimpleTAL.

Jakarta Commons has too many small projects for me to want to research Python equivalents. If you are looking for something in particular, check the Vaults of Parnassus first.

As for Apache XML, Python has SOAPy and ZSI implementing SOAP, and DOM, SAX, and XML-RPC are built in to the standard library. 4Suite implements DOM, SAX, RDF, XSLT, XInclude, XPointer, XLink and XPath, and has an XML and RDF data repository and server built on top, which would make it very roughly equivalent to both Cocoon and Xindice. I don't know of any Python equivalents for Batik, FOP or XMLSecurity.

Python has relational database access through its DBAPI standard, with adaptors for just about every database. There are a number of object databases coded specifically for (and often in) Python, the most well known being ZODB, which was developed by Zope. There are adaptors for other object databases as well.

There are really two spaces where Java outstrips Python, and the second space is IMHO directly caused by the first: standardization, and J2EE. Python puts out a language implementation and a lot of very useful libraries, but does not have any standardization body like the JCP. The result is lots of fragmentation. Individual developers write their own libraries and applications that compete with each other while offering wildly differing APIs and programming approaches. There has been some push to organize, through the official Python SIGs, but their efforts, while noble, have not been massively effective. Only this month has an initial implementation of a Python library repository similar to CPAN been released. Kudos to Andrew Kuchling, who made it happen, but it is LONG overdue.

Regarding J2EE, the only viable competitor is Zope. Even then, Zope really doesn't address the same problem space. The shortfall here comes from a number of different factors: corporate buy-in, public perception, lack of an established problem-space solution, and lack of published standards. Zope is a great solution, and has been used by a number of high-profile companies, but its focus is different.

Well, I hope you find this comparison to be useful. *I* certainly found it enlightening.

Can you suggest something better? This is not a troll, I may be spending
a good chunk of time learning Zope and if I can find something open source
and better than their CMF I would
love to hear about it.

Not true. Guido works for Zope Corporation.

1. Slash: The code behind Slashdot. Uses PERL as its underlying technology and is built on Linux. Requires Apache.
2. Zope: Commercial Open Source software which uses Python as its code base. Good support and training available, but the community appears to be lacking.
3. phpNuke: Underlies a lot of the free weblogs on the net at this time. Built on PHP coding and requires Apache. Some personality issues here, but a strong product.
4. PostNuke: Underlies many sites on the web, including both commercial and amatuer. An off-shoot of phpNuke, so built on PHP coding and requires Apache. VERY good project management and a solid timeline. Some recent deaths at the project have placed the team under stress.
5. phpSlash: A PHP port of the Slash system (one of the older ones, and as such is built on PHP coding. Seems solid, but lacks many of the modern features of slash.

There are many others, including (but not limited to): Nope, Druphal, KorWebLog, etc. This is still a crowded marketplace and people are trying to reinvent the wheel here often. Check out this site and do a search on CMS to get an idea of the diversity.

Best advice from my limited experience so far:

1. Decide which language best fits the way you program (Perl and PHP have roots in C/C++, Python is more like Basic)
2. Decide what features are drop-dead critical for your site (i.e. comment system, moderation system, workflow management, shopping cart)
3. Decide if you want commercial support if something goes wrong
4. Decide how much you want to spend (even if you do not spend on a system, you will wind up with costs for hosting, books, training, etc.)

In the end, I think I have decided on PostNuke. But your choice may be very different.

I disagree. I believe that it is perfectly valid to try to "get rich" writing free software. Good examples are Zope and the JBoss group. If giving software away for free helps to market consulting services, then one can indeed "get rich". Now, we're obviously not talking Bill Gates rich, but we are talking doctor rich (which is rich enough for me).

-Peter

-Peter

Those of us who use Zope are feeling much better than the Enhydra crowd these days. We've know for years that the rug would one day come out from underneath them just like it did with the Ars Digita community.

Zope Corporation has been moving in the complete oposite direction as Lutris and AD. They've recently opened their CVS to community check-ins, and are working with RMS to make their already open-source license GPL compatable.

When Zope Corporation hired the PythonLabs team, they heartily agreed to turn over the copyright of Python to Guido van Rossum personally, to be later transfered to the a community led Python Software Foundation a non-profit organization whose members consist of all of the developers who have CVS check-in ability.

It's obvious (to me, at least) that you can't build a sucessful open-source application based on a closed source platform like Java. Sooner or later, the virus of commercialism will invade the mindset of all the layers above it. Immagine if Apache, or Emacs were written in a closed source language. They would not be what they are today.

So, hopefully all those folks will learn their lesson and switch to a real open source object-oriented web application platform like Zope.

It uses the Squishdot System which is desinged to look and act like slashdot. Squishdot is written in Python and uses Zope.