zope and jboss or weblogic

[Martijn Faassen]

Gerhard H?ring <gerhard at bigfoot.de> wrote:
> * Wenshan Du <python at dohao.org> [2002-04-26 21:51 -0700]: > hi,
>> I like zope, I want to know what's the difference between zope and
>> jboss or weblogic? which is better? Can python & zope replace J2EE?
>> 
> Not only do Zope and J2EE play in a different league, but it's also
> different kinds of sports.

> J2EE is really only a bunch of so-called enterprise-APIs thrown together
> and made sure the versions of the selected APIs work well together.
> These APIs include data persistence, distributed computing, others I
> don't remember, and last but not least, a web application framework
> (servlets) with a everybody-has-it-so-we-too code-in-HTML solution
> (JSP). OTOH, I don't know (yet), what ZOPE really is about.

Well, Zope is a bunch of different things:

  * data persistence (the ZODB)

  * distributed computing (ZEO)
 
  * web application framework (ZPublisher, whole bunch of surrounding
    stuff such as session tracking)

  * web-based management/development UI

  * HTML templating (DTML, ZPT)

  * relational database integration (ZSQL)

  * indexing and searching (ZCatalog)

  * security infrastructure (who can do what)

  * additions on top of Zope, such as the content management framework (CMF)

And so on. It all looks surprisingly innocuous through the web UI, but
there's a lot there. It's cool.

One problem of the current generation of Zope (Zope 2) is that the APIs are 
often grown, not designed, and documentation, while these days rather
abundant, isn't that easy to work your way through (though with the
advent of several Zope books this has improved a lot).

Zope 3, currently under development in open source fashion and in
vaporware stage is promising to clean up things a lot, and establishes
a nice component architecture. In general things are becoming way more
Pythonic than Zope 2 is. When it's ready, Zope 3 looks to become very
very very cool.

Regards,

Martijn
-- 
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