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Zope Documentation (was RE: Python Popularity: Questions and Comments)

Paul Boddie paul at boddie.net
Fri Jan 4 12:03:14 EST 2002 
"Bruce Eckel" <Bruce at EckelObjects.com> wrote in message news:<mailman.1009731725.8168.python-list at python.org>...
> 
> But the initial learning curve is certainly a struggle, and
> shouldn't be that way. The Zope corp certainly knows this, but they
> seem to have their hands full moving the product forward and
> serving their customers.

Well, in order to compare the implementation of a very simple
application in both EJB and Zope, I revisited the Zope documentation
and got started quite quickly in implementing a Zope Product which
corresponds to a particular component in the EJB implementation. I
think the documentation has improved, but my brain may have helped me
a fair amount by remembering obscure details that were relevant back
when I last experimented with Zope (four years ago).

There's certainly a lot of hunting for documentation and going between
The Zope Book and the Zope Developer's Guide, especially if one is
developing a Product, as opposed to just customising some other
system. Still, I had success reasonably quickly, and some things
worked in more obvious ways than they did in JBoss...

> I changed my entire site to Zope last April, and have been
> periodically diving in and acquiring more understanding when I get
> the time. But at this point I know of nothing that would allow me
> to be as powerful or productive in being able to create web
> applications and in just creating and managing the site. Yes, it's
> far from perfect but it seems far more productive than anything
> else I've looked at.

There are some strange contradictions with Zope, though. For example,
access to the object database is very convenient (although I was aware
of the pitfalls), but this results in data being shared by many users
of a particular Product. To use sessions actually results in more work
for the developer, especially since I couldn't find the session
tracking documentation so easily; this seems to be the opposite of
other systems where sessions are something one gets for free, whereas
shared data requires more effort - something like entity beans, for
example.

The recent work done on Zope components did make the EJB and Zope
implementations quite similar in style, although it would be more
interesting to see how they compare if, for example, entity beans and
ZEO are employed in JBoss and Zope respectively. Perhaps I should put
together a deeper comparison than the one I was working on before:

  http://www.paul.boddie.net/Python/web_modules_enterprise.html

Paul
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