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Zope X3 3.0.0 Released
tj8 writes "The Zope 3 development team has announced Zope X3 3.0.0 final. After almost three years of development it has finally arrived!"
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Hmm.. what could Zope be ? Lemme guess ?
Another X-Prize contender ?
DukeNukem 3 beta release ?
A new competitor to the Roomba, but this time with shotguns ?
oh well, maybe Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom applications. The Zope community consists of hundreds of companies and thousands of developers all over the world, working on building the platform and Zope applications. Zope is written in Python, a highly-productive, object-oriented scripting language. ?
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
Zope is a Python framework.
If you're looking for a PHP alternative, Drupal is as close as it gets. (www.drupal.org)
Yet another story without any info.
Let's try this again:
* What is Zope
* What does it do?
Perhaps you could've just copied a blurb from the actual mailinglist?
Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language. It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database (RDBMS) connections and code.
-rylin
In other news: ispel-fo 0.2.18 was released today. ispell-fo is a faroese dictionary for ispell based on Føroyski orðalistin til rættlestur (The Faroese Spellchecking Dictionary). Massive rejoicing of computer hackers on Capitol Hill was not reported.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
You'd think story mods would put stuff like this in the stories. With over 800,000 registered users, the odds are pretty damn good not all of us know what the heck [latest software project] is.
I'm not even going to attempt to translate that bit into real English (you know, instead of buzzword-speak), but at least *try* to describe what the software does, guys...
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
Whoever modded this first post insightful was right for a change: the article has rigorously no interest whatsoever.
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/07/2 022238
... but is it XML compatible?
From the "Related Links" section, actual link titles:
Best deals: The Internet Yee-haw, I'm gonna buy me this "Innernet" thing fer real cheap!
Best deals: Announcements For when you need a cheap talking head to run your press conferences?
Best deals: Developers Because we all know Slashdot is doing its best to put all the programmers whose jobs have been outsourced to India back to work. Or is Slashdot now working to find those companies better deals than their American developer staffs...? The mind boggles.
Slashdot ought to re-title the "Related Links" section to "text-based ads that might be marginally related to the topic, but we doubt it."
p
In Korea, long hair is for old people!
That's what he said - "an alternative in PHP" - albeit in twisted wording.
it sucks and will continue to suck because of the things like DTML and ZODB. ZODB is very slow for bigger applications and not scalable. I worked it on 3 months and finally concluced that its not the best CMS avialable. a custom built CMS using php is the best solution.
I have casually following discussions on zope. The package seaside keeps coming up as also doing what zope trys to accomplish. Has anyone here compared the two. Has anyone ever used either before?
well, since someone posted a php alternative i figured i'd post the ruby alternative too :P
ruby on rails. very nice web framework
- tristan
Yeah, that drives me nuts. I still don't know (or care) what Ximian is.
The news media is particularly careful to always title things, "Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat", as if there were anyone left who didn't know who he was. The guy can generate 35 press releases in one day, and he'll be mentioned that way in every one, just in case Otzi thaws out, turns on the radio, and needs to know who they're talking about.
When a story like this comes up, I have to hit the page just to figure out whether I care about it. That surely contributes to the Slashdot effect. If the article said "Web application server Zope 3.0 is out", I'd instantly know that I don't need to hit their server.
geez...
--
It's good to hear that Zope v3 has been released. I now egarly await what I assume will be version 3 of the Zope based content management system Plone.
Zope is a web application server with an integrated object relational database and a turnkey web administration frontend. .Net.
It's basically a prototype of what application servers and databases are going to look like in 5 to 10 years.
From having worked with Zope I can say the power of this tool simply is breathtaking. Technology wise it's way beyond anything else I've seen, including J2EE and the bazillion other Appservers that come with it and other to-date solutions like the ones based on
It's downsides were the lack of consitent documentation for some parts, slow extra basic components (called "Products") and a lack of filtering in the Zope community. Like top grade Zope solutions right next to crappy beta level coding experiments. Lot of this has improved throughout the last 2 years though. Still missing is a larger support by ISPs running Zope on their servers.
Bottom line:
If anyone wants to build a special application with lot of custom server side programming, Zope is the powertool of choice. Technology wise it beats any other solution hands down. Think "The Linux of Application Servers".
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Is it really an Application Server and if so what services does it provide? I ask because the programmers tutorial makes it look like a run of the mill framework for generating webpages.
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.
Any performance indications or comparissons? Anyone port Petshop and compare it against JBoss or Geronimo perchance?
What advantages does Zope offer me over a J2EE server?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
zope ROCKS the boat...
it is one of the BEST content management system if you install PLONE on it as well....
zope rocks TOTALLY, believe it..
i use it and wouldn't change it for anything...
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
But how well does it react to a massive amount of users? Wait.... thats the server.....
The site seems to be getting clobbered. MirrorDot has mirrors of the linked pages and the tarball downloads.
~Jay
Why do any work on submissions which don't earn them anything?
Roland always gets a good write-up, you notice, as do all the other 'ads-masquerading-as-stories' from Michael.
Those pay, whereas stuff of genuine interest to the readers usually don't, so guess which submissions get the most attention and effort from Sims?
I'm pretty well versed in Zope 2, and am worried that Zope 3 seems too serious. One of the more common complaints about Zope has been its learning curve; I see no reason that those complaints won't continue with Zope 3. In Zope 2, if you wanted to create a new custom feature, you could create a product. I'm still wrapping my mind around the new concepts, but in Zope 3, it appears that you have to create a component, and maybe an adapter, and maybe a view. And you'll be strongly encouraged to write unit tests for all of it. Also, Zope has 2 templating systems: DTML and ZPT. ZPT is supposed to be the more recent, more correct system, but as far as I can tell, most people, myself included, are continuing to use DTML (I actually think DTML is conceptually superior, since it offers more precise error handling). Both systems are in Zope 3, but it appears that the new DTML has had features actually removed from it, because they theoretically encourage bad code. Zope is written in Python, and one of Python's philosophical guidelines has always been "We're all consenting adults here." I'm worried that Zope 3 in general is strongly pushing developers to create formalized, overdesigned solutions instead of the conceptually simple ones that Zope, and Python in general, currently encourage. I'm worried that Zope is becoming more like J2EE.
I guess this is huge news. :D ;-)
Uh, I can't cut and paste since Slashdot is hammering the Zope website, and I've been out of the Zope loop for a bit, but...
IIRC, Zope X3 is the development backend, intended for Zope Product developers to port their Zope 2 products with. The real-deal Zope 3 (not X3) with an actual front-end for users won't be ready for a long time still. IIRC. Can someone verify or correct me?
Zope can do impressive things, as Plone and the Boston.com website (runs on Zope) will attest... but it is maddeningly difficult to find decent documentation; at every turn one finds stub "This section still needs to be written" pages, or "This is really sort of out of date; the preferred way to do this is with ZPT, not DTML." (Upon following the ZPT link, you get "This section still needs to be written. In the meantime, try the DTML tutorial.")
Or at least, that was the state of Zope's documentation when I was researching it about 8 months ago. It's really frustrating, because it's clearly a powerful, flexible system, but it seems like most of the docs out there only get as far as talking about how powerful and flexible it is.
...I've never been able to make heads or tails of it. It has all its own cute names(TM?) for things, and another stupid pseudo-HTML markup language to learn. So developing Zope apps is way more confusing than it needs to be, even though day to day administration and use is pretty slick.
Despite being a whole lot less slick, I find OpenACS a lot easier to create apps with. The page flow of the canned apps is more elegant too.
Zope X3 is NOT , I repeat, is NOT Zope 3. It's an essential tool on the way to Zope 3, but not Zope 3 itself. So if you're not joining the Zope devteam, quit weighing in on their servers. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
it's what l33t people wash with
Zope was pretty
If complexity and bloat and big programmer egos turn you off, try Ruby on Rails.
Don't worry if you think you don't want to learn a new language, don't worry if you think Ruby on Rails is just another half-assed open-source framework that you'll explore, run into a wall, and discard.
RoR is a low-level MVC framework, yes. BUT it is *so* efficient that you will be writing high-level components in *hours* instead of days or weeks. You'll create an internal discussion site for your company in a weekend, you'll build a CMS in a matter of weeks, you'll throw together a fully functional bug tracker in 500 lines of code... etc.. remember why you use dynamic languages like Python or Ruby in the first place? That's right, to solve problems FAST! You'll have the same feeling when using Rails "wow.. if the designers send me those mock-ups, I'll have the site finished *before lunch*.
Here's a quick example of how to add a Customer object to your app once you create the database tables:Yup, that's all. It just automatically adds the right fields, sets the right defaults, and can create associations between objects as well (one line of code each).
Now let's try adding a full set of list/edit/view/etc pages so you can get started with your app right away:Now head over to "http://yourapp.com/customer/new" and add your first customer!
That's all.. how long does that take in Struts?
Now.. just head over to rubyonrails.org and watch the demo video. That's all. Just 10 minutes of your life and after you watch the video you can go back to your Zopes and your Struts and your what-have-yous.
Just watch the video.
Zope on a rope?
The #zope irc channel on the freenode IRC network is very helpful if you're polite.
I've been there off and on the last two or three years. Lots of helpful and knowledgable people.
Shae Erisson - ScannedInAvian.com
Actually, the parent is dead on. If you are too lazy to follow provided links, maybe you shouldn't be reading the story at all.
Ceterum censeo Microsoftem esse delendam
And a Pope on a Rope (yes, soap in the shape of the Pope, on a rope) ... now all I need for the next time I'm imprisoned for my geekly exploits is Zope on a Rope! Boo-yah.
A friend is doing lots of stuff with Zope and Plone. Besides the CMS, it is damn cool to watch reams of Python being generated directly from the UML model of the site (he's working towards round-trip). It looks like a great way to build complex sites and impose sanity controls on other people playing in your pond.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
I used to work for a web development firm that slowly went from a primarily Java based atmosphere to an all Zope based model.
Zope looks great on paper, and it was [relatively] easy to convince Management that it would "increase productivity", and would be "easy for the Java developers to learn and switch to". In all fairness, even the Java developers I worked with would agree that Zope offered some great features that other languages didn't offer. Aquisition, for one.
In practice, our Zope projects ended up being disasters. Slow, difficult to develop and debug. (By default, all of your code editing is done using the web based editor, which is just a simple HTML TextArea input). It does NOT lend itself well to development teams of more than a few people, and is so inefficient that you *must* use a caching proxy if you expect any substantial amount of traffic.
It's been about 6 months since I stopped developing in Zope, and I must say my sanity level has increased since then. Of course, I have not tried Zope 3 yet (which was rewritten from scratch apparently), so it definitely deserves a fair shot. I'm simply relaying my past experiences with the Zope 2.5 thru 2.7 versions, for whatever it's worth.
Python has triple quoted strings (eg. ''' a string ''') which preserve whitespace.
These can contain format strings like C
Fill a Python dictionary with the necessary values:ThengivesThe HTML string could, of course be longer (and still preserve whitespace:and the dictionary might beThis Python statementwill output the following HTML:But this seems too elementary. Have I misunderstood?
It doesn't sound like you were using Zope right. With ExternalEditor, you can edit ZPT/DTML with the editor of your choice. Zope also has built in WebDAV, which works well with DreamWeaver and most other professional web tools. Zope also supports CVS , which helps with team development.
I wasn't there, but it doesn't sound like you guys did your homework.
You love me! You really really love me!!
Sure but he was asking for a decent documentation, which I agree is still lacking unfortunately. The Zope book is quite nice and it's free so that it makes it a good option but I really need a decent reference written by a professional writer. Maybe that will come once Zope 3 is out, it's really a shame that what looks like the best application server out there lacks doesn't have a decent book available.
" 1. Language does not determine speed. Algorithms do."
CISC vs RISC.
Assembly vs C++
Model A vs Porsche.
Software rendering vs GPU.
Working at the RS/GIS Center at CRREL (a US army engineer research and development lab), I was asked to make a brand new website for the building, since the current one stinks. My boss was set on me using Plone/Zope, which I had mixed feelings about.
Plone is a very nice CMS. It has a special wysywig editor for Internet Explorer and is very user friendly. The default skin (and this, I guess, was the reason for choosing it) looks pretty nice and is pretty elegantly coded. The template system that it uses is really cool and XML-based. It can run on any major OS, but there are some issues in moving a site across systems/OSes.
However, the problem is that you can't just run it straight on Apache, like you could with a PHP/MySQL application. It runs its very own web server. So you have to make an entry in your httpd.conf to make a virtual host that goes to the port that the Zope server is running on (which the system admin doesn't want to do). It's actually gonna be hosted on its own server, just to make sure it doesn't upset any of the dependencies that their mission-critical stuff has. So if I wanted to use it for my own purposes on a shared server, I can't.
One problem for me was that making custom content types required knowledge of Python, which I was able to fake my way through somewhat. This is made much easier with something called Archetypes, a bunch of classes and functions that does stuff for you.
I guess the biggest thing that made me uncomfortable with it was that it uses a custom database format and a custom format for storing all the site's files inside of one actual file. And you can't just move that one file, there's other dependency issues and problems with paths if you move it to a different location or OS.
I was, however, to develop the site much quicker with Plone/Zope than I would with developing my own CMS for that purpose or using an existing PHP one. And the end result is pretty nice. It's going to be very impressive. Once a co-worker finishes adding all the content to it, the new site will be up and tunneled from the location I linked to in this article.
Well, it would have helped with the steep learning curve if Zope had good documentation. I mean check out the docs on the website, it's unorganized, out of date, lacks clear and useful examples, etc, etc, etc. In contrast with the PHP online documentation which is *very* well organized, always up to date, and has heaps of useful examples add to that very useful user comments.
I've made it a habit to check their online docs on Zope.org once in a while to see if there are any changes or improvements but it's been the same thing for two years now. At least for me, what has kept me back from adopting Zope for my projects has been the lack of good documentation: especially on the ZPT and "Products" concepts. I've tried using Zope 2 before on a project and I got totally confused with all the new concepts of its so-called "Products" I spent three weeks of my development time deciphering the arcane documentation on their website and searching their mailing lists for answers to my questions. I gave up finally and switched to PHP and I got the project done in just two days.
Now we have Zope 3 which is even more "concept heavy" than Zope 2 (apparently it uses some sort of MVC-like thing that only the Zope devs really understand). I just hope that Z3 is better documented than its predecessor. Better docs would mean more developers writing stuff for Zope and increased community activity.
Sorry. I don't see why your sig is supposed to be clever.
l #u npack
I looked it up and all it does is decodes Base64-encoded text. Nothing groundbreaking, all you did was use an existing API.
http://www.rubycentral.com/ref/ref_c_string.htm
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Text window editing is there, but nobody ever uses it.
Zope supports external editing (external editor - d'oh!), so you can browse the management interface and open objects in your prefered editor. Works great for me & supports webdav locks.
This is one of the biggest missunderstandings about zope.
If you're working with code, you should be storing it on the filesystem. One of the biggest mistakes Zope developers make is to develop inside the ZODB using the textarea, which obviously puts them off zope.
Through-the-web editing is there if you need it. It's handy, but for any serious development you should be developing filesystem products.
Does anyone have a short list of large scale sites that utilize Zope? Thanks!
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
I gave up Zope and stuck to PHP soon after that (and the fact I could not wrap my mind around their 'TAL' thingy, call me dumb).
Non-Linux Penguins ?
I've been puzzling about what Zope is for ages. This thread just confirms what I suspected: that nobody can explain what it is. Sure, they can tell you what it's got in it, how it's "great", how it's "the future" etc. but that's no help if I'm trying to decide whether to use it for anything.
I build web applications frequently. But I've never been able to find any information which I can use to decide whether Zope would be any good for them.
Let's try a different approach. What organizational requirements are met by Zope? What kinds of sites does it make easier? In what ways easier? Development? Maintenance? How much easier?
If I have a 500 person-hour project building a site from scratch with Apache, CGI, and Python how much can I expect to save using Zope?
Zope is a piece crap.
This comes from someone who has used it in several commercial projects. It's an alternative to PHP/MySQL but not for anything serious.
Since the site has been "slash dotted", page transitions some times return raw python instead of a rendered page.
A great testimonial to its robustness...
will it run Linux?
If you use KDE, point Kate at webdav://myzopeserver.example.com:1980/ and view the ZODB just like a directory on your local filesystem. If you need to do some command-line work (grepping, etc.) then open that URL in Konqueror and drag the interesting folder to your desktop and work on your local version.
I hated working with Zope through the textarea, but editing it through webdav via my normal editor without having to install any plugins like the ExternalEditor setup is extremely nice.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Python is called a "script language" because it provides an interpreter. Java and C does not. This of course sucks, an interpreter is VERY handy for testing stuff.
;)
If you don't want to get ridiculed, call pythons interpreter a "just-in-time bytecode compiler". because that's what it is. Instead of running a separate program to compile code into byte-code as you do with Java, Python does it on the fly.
There are also lots of cool extras, like Psyco, which is another jit-compiler, but it will actually compile to machinecode. Not ony that, it will precompile common results of functions, so instead of calling the method it will just look up the result if you already called the method with these parameters. This can actually sped up many algoritmic functions much more than it would rewriting them in C. (Psyco is usable with Zope, btw, and will speed up for example Plone a lot).
Other cool extensions are Pyrex, which is somewhat of a mix of C an Python. It let's you use Python-syntax to make C-code.
The whole point of all this is that the difference between compiled languages, byte-compiled languages and interpreted languages has gone away. The borders between these are now very fuzzy and the speed differences decreasing to the point that interpreted languages in some extreme cases are FASTER than compiled languages.
So if somebody balks at script langauges, they are not up to date on language development. If they are smart people: Get them up to date. If they are not: Just don't mention the s-word (that is, scripts).
People keep asking what its good for,....
http://www.zope.org/Resources/ZopePowered/
Among the list of sites powered by zope.... NATO, SGI and AARP amongst others....
Words are only yours until someone else uses them...
Zope 2:
Mantra - "Persistence is the root of all productivity"
- Rapid development of class/content definitions
- 1000s of 3rd Party Products
- Relational connectivity
- Session framework
- Safe execution environment for Through The Web (TTW) scripting
- Catalog/Indexing service
- Caching infrastructure
- Interfaces
- Security model
- WITH CMF (Content Mgmt Framework) you get
- Workflow
- Repurposing content definitions
- Skins mechanism
- a simple component model
- Best Practices of development CMS ontop of Zope
- Events
- Lots of other services Zope 2 provides but I cant really think of them now. The value tends to be the effortlessness to create a class and persist their instances.
Zope X3/?3:
Mantra - "No more magic! Components are the only way for us to reuse higher level functionality"
- Almost everything Zope 2 has
- ZODB/FS Syncronizaation mechanism
- Component Architecture (stitch components together with XML)
- Different security system with the ability to change security subsystem easily
- Almost everything Zope 2 has.
- Uses all of Python 2.3/2.4's features without limitations
- Faster
- Higher level services like Widget system
- Internationalized in the core (instead of bolted on like in Plone)
A few big reasons why Zope is cool:
- object database (ZODB). amazing. know when (not) to use it.
- Its Python, stupid!
- there are few barriers; almost anything you can imagine has been done with the system. Its got a great community and once you get into it; its quite fun to program!
Ummm, if you use emacs you can edit the code in emacs using ange ftp, check out this for example. Works great. Plus you can install the dtml and zpt minor modes and get all the context sensitive highlighting which is really nice.
Just Some Geek guy suggested Kate with the webdav protocol. I use vim with it's ftp:// protocol. You can easily edit zope content in pretty much any editor that supports network protocols.
I can't comment on the quality (yet), but at least they're there now as opposed to how long it took to get decent docs for Zope2. I think Zope2's organic growth made it difficult to maintain decent documentation. It looks like documentation was a part of the development process for X3, expecially since it's such a dramatic change from Zope2.
- Is it really an Application Server and if so what services does it provide?
"Application server" is an overloaded buzzword. What do you mean by it?Zope is a transactional object database with a security layer and an HTTP interface built on top.
The object databases give you a structure for containing content; the security layer controls access; and the HTTP interface lets you publish that content in whatever way you like.
The usual way to use Zope is to store content (eg., documents, images, external data sources), which is manipulated by logic (eg., Python scripts, SQL scripts) and rendered to (X)HTML (eg., with templates).
To illustrate the power that Zope gives you, the entire management interface is built with Zope. To create a site, you build it inside your browser.
If you think this is weird, think about wikis.
Of course, Zope is powerful enough to offer alternative access mechanisms. You can build your site in your own file system, then upload it using WebDAV, for example.
- I ask because the programmers tutorial makes it look like a run of the mill framework for generating webpages.
It isn't. And there's nothing "run of the mill" about Zope.- Is it compiled into native code?
Parts of Zope, and parts of Python, are written in C. Most of the code is in Python. Python is compiled into interpreted bytecode, but if you install Psyco, a profiler-based JIT compiler similar to Sun's HotSpot, it will be compiled into native code on the fly.- 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.
Python is not a scripting language, though. I think the day when people laughed at you for mentioning/using Python is long gone by.- Any performance indications or comparissons? Anyone port Petshop and compare it against JBoss or Geronimo perchance?
I don't have any comparisons to offer, but Zope is fast and scalable. Zope's performance is nevertheless its weakest aspect. However, compared to many application servers, it flies.- What advantages does Zope offer me over a J2EE server?
There are numerous advantages, but I'll just mention one: Time to market. I can prototype and deploy an application faster than it takes you to boot your IDE and create your EJB classes, and it will be modular, object-oriented, secure and instantly usable.I can go on vacation without my PC, and get a call from a customer who has a problem with a page. All I need to work is a PC with a web browser -- an Internet café will do.
Zope is to J2EE as wiki is to the web.
- Yeah, I couldn't believe it when I saw it. I thought it must have been just for the first step in Zope, then I searched where the files (template and other elements) were saved so I could access them directly with my editor of choice. No go, it's inside a database.
You didn't look far enough. The "textarea" editing is optional.- I gave up Zope and stuck to PHP soon after that (and the fact I could not wrap my mind around their 'TAL' thingy, call me dumb).
Each to his own. However, looking at the horrible code that PHP forces you to write, I would chalk this one up as shooting yourself in the foot. With a Magnum.(And whoever invented the idea of putting code in templates deserves the same treatment.)
Zope 3 also strongly encourages development on disk, not through the browser (and not storing your code in the ZODB, the object database).
There's a bunch of other things. Anyway, it's a different world. I don't personally know if I'll partake -- there's lots of other ways to develop web pages with Python, and I'm happy with those.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
In practice, my Zope 1 and 2 projects ended up being great successes. I now do almost all of my development on the file system using regular old Python classes as much as possible and building glue layers / service gateways for templates and very thin scripts that are stored in the ZODB. But more and more, I use the ZODB for what it's good at: object storage. Or I use a Table Gateway (Fowler) based system for RDBMS interaction.
Doing Python development with Zope 2, however, takes time. We've built up our own core frameworks that we use for base classes and helpers that help insulate me from the spaghetti mess of the Zope 2 framework. Zope 3 aims to correct this by providing a cleaner API, shallow inheritance (often all one needs to do is inherit 'Persistent'), and is built on the concepts of many small collaborating objects instead of the heavy monolithic objects of Zope 2, making it easier to extend someone else's code to your purposes by providing 'Adapters'.
If you were to just look at the developer tutorials for Zope X3, you'd realize it's a completely different system than what you're used to with Zope 2. It's the same basic concepts that Zope and it's ancestor (Bobo) have been built on, but rethought for greater clarity and adaptability.
- And what other options do you have available then ?!?
The most popular (and flexible) one is WebDAV, but Zope also supports FTP. Many editors (Eclipse, Emacs, vi) support seamless editing through these formats, either out of the box or with plugins.I would argue that doing PHP cleanly -- cleanly enough for it to scale with your application -- takes a lot of effort. At some point you will grow to reach a threshold where the benefits of PHP will be canceled out by the effort to fight its warts. And I would argue that you reach that stage pretty quickly.
PHP is extremely dirty in places. For example, the default [at least in Debian's PHP distribution] fallback of variable lookup into the (if I remember correctly) $_SESSION dictionary is horrendous. There's a lot to be said for making all warnings terminal -- that it doesn't stop execution on references to uninitialized variables is just mind-boggling.
And how many times have you seen things like:
in the middle of some page? I'm sure it can be prevented, but it shows that the shoddier a programming language is, the harder it is to compensate for its shoddiness.Don't get me wrong, I'm all into the benefits of the "worse is better"/MIT-versus-New-Jersey way of thinking, but look a Python -- a dynamically-typed, in some eyes "unsafe" language that manages to be incredible good. While PHP is a proof that simplicity increases productivity, Python shows that you can have the simplicity of PHP without sacrificing what PHP has sacrificed in terms of architecture and linguistic robustness.
- I like clean languages, so I truly wanted to like Zope, but its deep non-intuitiveness killed my interest. Sorry.
Your loss. *wink*Zope has a certain learning curve, to be sure, but getting over the initial hurdle -- and many Zope developers will tell you this -- results in a "zen" moment that will change the way you look at application development and never look back (at PHP) again. In other words, a little goes a long way.
As a developer fostered on the concept of object-oriented (*) programming, Zope is incredibly intuitive to me, and PHP isn't. The fact that PHP starts with the notion that a source module is a page is, to me, ass-backwards. Or ass in front, if you like.
(*) And I don't mean C++ class inheritance crap. I mean the idea of modularity, separation of concerns, encapsulation, composition -- it doesn't have anything to do with classes, and can be practiced in pretty much every Turing-complete language.
I was talking about "making hardware fast and reliable" not "mix 10 technologies because you can handle a single one of them and want to fiddle" and compensate for that by charging your customer for quadrupled hardware". That is a big difference.
And it's strange, but wereever I go I encounter a hideous mess of tangled systems set up by nerds that can't even use the right screws to fasten a harddrive, have set up 3 servers, two DB's a webserver and a MTA with some cryptic (read: crappy) perl glue, were one solid workstation with a good harddrive some extra ram and a good email client with three filters applied can do the job faster, more reliable and with MUCH less maintainance costs. Any geek who thinks he's cream because he knows how to set up 10 different DBs and 5 distros (and I only use Debian/Zope) whom I have to clean up after (just happend today) is not a computer expert but a moron to me. And usually an arrogant nusciance (spelling?) on top of that.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Then one day, I woke up and found a damn near unfilterable politics section awash with flamewar, a home page announcing the latest news about AOL, and the snarky rants on posting etiquette outnumber the comments.