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!"

Comments

Re:Sigh

[eobanb]

I've always wondered where we should draw the line. Obviously if someone posted something like, "Mozilla, a free open-source web browser...."

Then SOMEONE would post, "oh come ON, do we really need to be told what Mozilla is?

So what I'm wondering is, what DO we explain to readers and what don't we? There are obviously pieces of software and hardware that are familiar to some, but not others.

Has anyone here compared seaside and zope

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

On Zope

[Qbertino]

Zope is a web application server with an integrated object relational database and a turnkey web administration frontend.
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 .Net.
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".

Re:On Zope

[eviltypeguy]

Object oriented application frameworks like Zope are the future:

My company implemented our own solution using mod_perl and Oracle. (The application is about 300,000 lines of object oriented Perl, and no it doesn't look like line noise, programmers are thwacked soundly for writing bad code).

Perl object classes are declared for each database table within the application. Scripts parse the SQL schema and insert what 'data members' (columns) belong to each object and sets up a hash that contains all the deletion rules (when is a record safe_to_delete, etc.), and a description of the length of each table field, etc.

An XS backend (C code glued to perl) seralises and desiralises the object for each Apache request, once the object is ready to be written, the XS backend splits out the data and writes it into the table used by the object (using insert, delete, or update as appropriate).

The result? A wicked fast application server environment that is very close to a 'rapid application development environment'.

Example?

Let's say a programmer wants to create a new 'Company' object.

my $new_company = fqdbcn('Company')->new;

("fqdbcn" here means turn Company into a fully qualified database class name for the current application)

The programmer wants to set some fields and write the new object to the database:

$new_company->set(
name => 'ABC Company, Inc.'
active => 1,
accounting_id => 'ABC001',
);

$new_company->write;

The programmer later wants to load the object back up to update the Company record since they're changing their name.

He has three choices (that come to mind) to load the object back in so he can update it:

choice 1 (by id):
my $company = fqdbcn('Company')->load(id => whatever_the_id_was);

choice 2 (by accounting_id):
my $company = fqdbcn('Company')->find(where => { accounting_id => 'ABC001' })->fetch;

choice three (by name):
my $company = fqdbcn('Company')->find(where => { name => 'ABC Company, Inc.' })->fetch;

He can then update it like so:
$company->set(name => 'ABC Conglomo Co, Inc.');
$company->write;

What if the programmer wants to delete a company object he has?

$company->delete;
$company->write;

The advantage of our homegrown system is that we can use the application as an object oriented system, or we can pull data using SQL for reporting using the rdbms (Oracle).

We're working on converting our framework to Postgre because $16,000 a year for Oracle is just way too freaking much for a 10 employee company (some would say too much for any company).

I could go on, but suffice it to say that things like Zope are where Applications are going. After working with our homegrown framework (and all of it's iterations) for the past 5 years or so I can say without a doubt that once you adopt an object based model for writing applications you will never want to go back.

OK we need some input from the Zope heads

[Timesprout]

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?

Re:OK we need some input from the Zope heads

[Dub Kat]

"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

Zope's Changing Philosophy

[greg.steffensen]

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.

Zope is fine, but...

[aquarian]

...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.

Re:There we go again...

[Feneric]

Some things have to be assumed for the /. audience, though. I think a real geek should know what Zope is... Zope is to dynamic web sites what Apache is to static ones...

And maintainable designs

[xixax]

The point of a content management system is that it allows non technical users to maintain the site after initial setup.

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.

Zope great in theory ... not so much in practice.

[barwin]

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.

Lack of any good docs

[Anonymous Coward]

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.