Python CGI and Jave Server Pages (JSP)

[David Mitchell]

I've got a customer who's gone down the path that Maan doesn't want to go
down, and they've got their own set of problems as a result.  Hopefully this
will be useful to Maan, then someone can answer MY questions <g>

This customer decided to deploy their small B2B app using WebSphere/DB2
running on an AIX box.  They were completely sold on the marketing bumph
from IBM; they've finally gone live, WAAAAY late and WAAAY over budget, only
to find that ongoing development / deployment / support / hardware &
software upgrades for their current solution brings its own set of horrors.

They didn't take a lot to convince them that a partial or complete rewrite
based on open-source products was at least worth consideration.  Initially,
I was thinking Apache/Tomcat/JBoss (or something similar), but lately I've
started thinking about ditching JSP altogether and looking at Zope.  Most of
their business logic is fairly rudimentary, although it's likely to need
tweaking fairly regularly; although they expect to grow exponentially (which
startup doesn't?), their current processing and storage requirements are
fairly low; they want to be able to engage a relatively cheap Web designer
on an ongoing basis to use stuff like UltraDev to keep their site fresh,
rather than retain one or more relatively expensive Java guys to do the job;
the content generation guys are completely removed from any business logic
and site design; although they're doing B2B, there's not vast amounts of
money at risk if the site is compromised; Zope seems a very good fit in
these respects.  They're fairly technically capable as an organization, and
would probably be able to learn enough Python and DTML to eventually do a
lot of the maintenance work in-house.

A few questions, though:
- has anyone had any experience migrating from a J2EE-based app to a
Zope-based solution?  There's obviously a few challenges here, but I'm not
sure how to start quantifying them
- any "from the trenches" stories about Zope's scalability?  I know the Zope
site says it scales "a lot", but it looks like most of their reference sites
are primarily concerned with "content publishing" as distinct from "B2B" or
"e-commerce", and the requirements are significantly different
- any existing B2B sites based on Zope?  In particular, a few comparable
reference sites would be handy at this point...

Thanks in advance

monch