Forum OpenACS Q&A: OpenACS or ZOPE

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1: OpenACS or ZOPE
Posted by mary johnson on 11/05/03 09:24 AM
My organitation is going to do an Intranet, and we are know deciding witch technology to use. We have find Zope and OpenACS, both very interesting for our project.

Can anyone explain me witch advantage I would have using Zope ?

Thanks.

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2: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 11/05/03 09:52 AM
Mary,

I suppose that if you want to know advantages of Zope over OpenACS, then you've got the wrong forum :) (and a wrong web site all together).

If I remember general advocacy POV that can be distilled from various threads found in forums of *this* site, "Zope is a mess."  This maybe an oversimplification (by far).

Advantages or disadvantages are a very difficult thing to juddge -- you can't really have a one-size-fits-all.  Tell us more about what exactly you are looking for (a full-blown intranet system with all the bells and whistles, or something a lot more down to Earth?), and then you are likely to get a much more up to the point answer.

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3: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on 11/05/03 10:06 AM
You have no advantages when using Zope :)

Remember that these forums are not a marketplace - we don't really do bids and tenders here (not in the first place at least).

Also only few people here have experience with Zope, but loads with OpenACS. I'd expect some bias...

To help you at least a bit, you should give us some information.

How many people are going to use the intranet? OpenACS generally seems to be a bit more involved...

Which of the oodles of Zope products do you intend to look at/use?

Do you want to develop new functionality?

Do you want to use Windows for your server? (Then forget about OpenACS alltogether)

Which database?

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4: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 11/05/03 10:32 AM
Not sure if you read http://www.zope.com/Training/Z4ITraining. At the moment OpenACS is clearly missing something like this, so this would be an advantage (training on how to use Zope for your intranet). OTOH, I'm sure if interest is out there that myself and a couple of others would be able to give you a good handson session :).

Furthermore, there is no OpenACS book out there (yet). You will have to wade through the documentation and use your printer.

There is no single driving entity behind OpenACS like it is behind Zope. This is good as long as the single entity stays in business.

You get to learn Python. From my very limited experience with it, it is harder to get than TCL. And therefore understanding the Zope API most likely is more challenging than getting the OpenACS API (though a couple of developers might want to disagree with me here).

Zope was traditionally a CMS. OpenACS has always been a community plattform. Therefore, if you want to use Collaboration within your intranet, your are most likely going to find the better solutions within OpenACS, due to the focus of the software. If you are looking for a publishing software for your intranet OTOH, Zope might be the better choice.

But to really help you you'd have to answer Dirk's questions and decide, whether you are going to play with the code yourself or expect more out of the box solutions.

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5: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by mary johnson on 11/05/03 12:09 PM
I did a mistake. I wanted to ask about the advantages of OpenACS over Zope. Sorry!

I think you are right and I have to explain a litle more about our necesities.

- I need a solution for a Collaborative based intranet (mail, calendaring service, forums, mailing lists,...).

- Workflow applications are also important for us.

- Documental management. It would be interesting to have a WebDAV access and the posibility of doing document searches.

- Perhaps we would take users from an Active Directory

- We are an organization of about 300 people

- About DB, I think Oracle is too much expensive for us. I think PostGreeSQL would be our choice. Is it all right?

- It would be an multi-language space.

Thank you.

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6: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Claudio Pasolini on 11/05/03 02:09 PM
You can find some interesting notes in this article of Reuven Lerner, wich has used both (and many others).
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7: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 6)
Posted by Joel Aufrecht on 11/05/03 02:25 PM
"- About DB, I think Oracle is too much expensive for us. I think PostGreeSQL would be our choice. Is it all right?"

PostGreSQL and Oracle are supported about equally by OpenACS.

"- It would be an multi-language space."

OpenACS 5.0, currently in Alpha, has i18n support, both for content (identifying different versions of the same thing in different languages; native UNICODE storage) and for the web applications (UI can be changed to German, etc).  Not all of the localization is complete. but anyone can contribute translations.  You can see the work in progress at http://translate.openacs.org

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8: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 5)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on 11/05/03 03:00 PM
I hope you don't expect unbiased contributions here: Take OpenACS! ;)

What you want to do is (mostly) there with OpenACS: the upcoming 5.0 release has the features you are looking for. Needless to say some are in a fairly rough shape, and some of your requirements don't make sense yet to me. E.g. what is "workflow applications"?

There is one beautiful thing about free software: It is free! You can download the whole stuff, install it on a box, and configure it to your needs. The only investment needed is time.

Thus you can form your own (less biased) opinion based on your needs.

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9: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by David Cohen on 11/12/03 10:50 PM
To get an idea of where Zope is at, this article by Jon Udell, "Revisiting Zope" from August 2003, should help:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/08/01/30OPstrategic_1.html

As far as Python itself goes, well, here's what Peter Norvig, author of some important texts on Lisp and AI, has to say about it (from python.org):

"Python has been an important part of Google since the beginning, and remains so as the system grows and evolves. Today dozens of Google engineers use Python, and we're looking for more people with skills in this language." said Peter Norvig, director of search quality at Google, Inc.

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10: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Talli Somekh on 11/13/03 12:53 AM
Eh. I hear that Boston.com is having trouble in making Zope scale well, and I know that Greenpeace is giving up trying to get Zope to scale well.

Either way, I look forward to seeing Zope3 come out. It promises to be very nice.

talli

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11: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Don Baccus on 11/13/03 02:45 AM
Switching to PostgreSQL (from Zope DB) helped Greenpeace's problems a lot with their activist site.

(for those of you going "huh?" the main CMS site is OpenACS but the activist site was done in Zope before they learned about us, eventually they plan to switch over).

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12: Re: OpenACS or ZOPE (response to 1)
Posted by Jonathan Ellis on 11/13/03 03:34 AM
Too bad doing sql queries in Zope is such a PITA :(