How does Zope Rate Compared to IIOS and NAS?

CodeShark writes "With all of the current comparisons between IIOP and the NAS Servers out there, I recently saw information on /. regarding the Zope application server. I am wondering about other /. reader's experiencing using this framework in terms of reliability, stability, and ease of use. "

Comments

Re:It Depends on the Application

[Anonymous Coward]

Zope is a very different animal from Enhydra.
It's not a 100% mature platform, but it's a very
powerful tool for managing distributed authorship
of a website, and appears to be developing very
fast in terms of SQL-driven web sites (currently devleopment is focused on threading) and has significant application serving momentum. It is the product of one company, who has bothered to OpenSource(tm) it. Hopefully they will continue to see the sense in generating interest in it by releasing new features as they are developed and by including useful additions from outside sources.

my experiences with Zope

[Anonymous Coward]

Zope is a content-management software package that is OpenSource licensced and based in the Python scripting language. The advantages to this package : nice made-to order web administration; FREE; allows you do develop in a very modular way- for instance you can easily change the entire look and feel of your entire site without changing each page; supposed XML-RPC support- with the current trends that will be a requisite for staying in the web/app server game. The disadvantages : does not easily integrate to other platforms( they should offer EJB support ), based in python( it is not easy to find python developers ), a little buggy( not too bad... mad props to the Zope people ), the product API is pretty complicated( although there is a new feature called ZClasses to alleaviate this problem ), no scalability features( the entire server is confined to one processor space - although with XML/RPC this could be a non-issue(?) ).

All in all, this product could be seen as being in direct competition with products like BEA WebLogic. It seems to me that this product was an excellent idea that was put into effect without much thought as to the existing marketplace. No technology is self-sufficient, and ignoring the entire CORBA/Enterprise Java Beans space was a major mistake. However, it is FREE and no one is complaining.

If you know Python, take a gander at www.zope.org. If you don't go with EJB.

- Anonymous Coward

Re:my experiences with Zope

[Anonymous Coward]

What I mean is EASY EJB support. Zope Objects are almost identical to servlet/EJB. If a Zope user( NOT A ZOPE GURU ) could easily drop in an EJB or a servlet, life would be easier( as there is a huge market for pre-made EJBs ).

I was just giving my objective opinion of Zope as compared to other similar products. As little bridges are made to other groups of developers, Zope will gain more and more momentum( if EJB/servlet support was made- Zope would probably make major headlines ). If anything, I would support Zope over BEA's product- which costs approx . $5000 ). Zope definately has a long way to go before it could be considered for large-scale development.

-me

Re:my experiences with Zope

[AMK]

No technology is self-sufficient, and ignoring the entire CORBA/Enterprise Java Beans space was a major mistake.

Zope's predecessors, Principia and Bobo, date back to 1996, long before EJB (or even JavaBeans) existed, so it's not surprised that they're not supported. If anyone actually cares about EJB, I'm sure people will work on bridging to them.

Re:my experiences with Zope

[NoneToBe]

Zope doesn't BUILT-IN support for JavaBeans, however, since Zope is available cross-platform and Python includes support for Corba and COM Zope can access and control EJB using these (if you can stomach using WinJava).

Python itself runs on Java (JPython) and there is a vapourware project underway to allow interaction between Zope and JPython. Also, there are a number of Python/Java connection schemes around. I believe there is one that allows you to subclass from an external JRE.

Hope this clears this up!

Re:my experiences with Zope

[alext]

The big thing about Zope for me is the WebDAV support (which allows anyone in my organization to upload content) and the integrated database (which keeps a fully versioned history of documents and other objects - though you wouldn't want to use it for very volatile info).

We're using Weblogic too, but it would take a lot of work to add these features (no WebDAV yet, though database would probably be Versant).

cheers

alex

It Depends on the Application

[cjs]

I suspect that which application server you want depends a lot on the application you want to build. I've had a look at Zope, and found it a bit of a pain because the actual development of the web site was too web-oriented. (I want to keep everything in files and keep these under revision control.) As well, it wasn't really optimised for the programming side of building applications.

What works much better for me is Enhydra, which is very good in terms of developing Java code, and lets you leave plain stuff (html files, images) just as it is.

However, as I said, I suspect which will be better for you depends a lot on what you're trying to build.

cjs

Zope

[singletrack]

Zope is about as full featured as you can get. I've been using it daily for a few months and haven't run into any real problems. The biggest plus is how easy it is to configure, use and maintain. Customization and extending its capabilities are fairly simple and easy with Python. There are already quite a few add ons for it, even one called Squishdot that mimics the way /. works that is very easy to setup and use. Check out Zope, you won't be disappointed...

Zope Introduction Article

[Cos]

Not really an answer to the question, but it may be of interest to other readers of the thread. We just posted a Zope introduction article at DevShed:

http://www.devshed.com/Server_Side/Z ope/Intro/