Greetings...
Perhaps I should have made it boldface when I said "this comparison
is based on things that matter to me". Different people will clearly
have different criteria (like ease of learning).
When you get beyond basic document management, Zope is hard
to learn. This isn't helped by the fact that the documentation
still needs work. The docs I saw for ACS were much better, but I
have no idea how good the docs are when you are trying to do really
customize things. I didn't put this in my comparison, because I've
been using Zope for more than a year. I've gotten past the learning
curve.
When I started working on this, the OpenACS folks were still in
the process of porting a lot of the pieces of ACS. I remember that
the spam module wasn't there yet. At the time, I was worried that
OpenACS would always lag behind ACS Classic quite a bit, though it
appears that the OpenACS people have worked quite fast. If I had
seen more elements that really compelled me toward ACS, I would
certainly have put in the effort to install OpenACS or ACS Classic
if my concerns about OpenACS had continued. But, I have the same 24
hour days and too much to do that everyone else does. In the end, I
didn't see enough to compell me away from the system I already
knew.
The original poster here mentioned that I talk about Objects a
lot. Objects themselves are not important, but for what we're doing
having reusable, easily customizable components is. And, I think
Zope excels in this and there are some other things coming into
existence now that make it better.
With regards to the "Zope is Evil" article, I'd have to agree
with that. I like working on top of the Zope architecture, but I
don't think I'd really want to be working on the architecture itself.
Getting Zope running within a special Python interpreter inside of
ACS sounds like a very big job to me.
If there are factual errors in my document, please let me know.
I had initially thought that TCL would be faster than Python,
but later heard that TCL is actually much slower due to the data
structures used. If someone has done good benchmarks of the two,
I'd be curious to see that.
I am a Zope user, but I still believe there is plenty to be learned
by looking at how ACS does things. If anyone has any questions about
how Zope does things, I'd be happy to shed whatever light I can.
Kevin
