Forum OpenACS Q&A: Response to Article on ACS x Zope

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Posted by Jimmie Houchin on
Albert: I did a search for specific file types. I may have missed some significant files in ACS that I'm not aware of. I only did *.tcl and *.adp. I am not familiar with ACS sources.

The difference in our Zope descriptions was also that I limited it to *.py and *.dtml. In Zope the dtml files are used for management screens and anything you want rendered into html. The py files are the Zope source code. The reason I searched for *.py is because Python bytecode compiles it's source files. Their will be a corresponding *.pyc file for each *.py file.

With Zope you can use the database of your choice. I like the ZODB which comes with Zope. Its most common storage is called FileStorage. ZODB can use various storages to hold the data including PostgreSQL via a new RelationalStorage. Regardless of which backend storage one uses for ZODB it is relatively transparent to usage. The user will not have to create tables/column etc.

Feel free to use any RDBMS of your choice with Zope. ZSQL Methods are an elegant way to interface Zope with any RDBMS. Zope will also cache the RDBMS items as objects. Their are many users of PostgreSQL on the Zope list. Or conversly their are many Zope users on the PostgreSQL list. :)

With the coming Zope 2.2, Zope will be including a new Help System. The Help system will help explain various parts of Zope and it's API.

A couple of different e-commerce products are being written for Zope via some users. Their is even a ZCommerce mailing list. This is an area which will definitely be improved and is as we speak.

There are many areas which Zope's OO framework is paying off nice benefits. There have been some very recent improvements that have been relatively easily implemented because of this.

The Zope community is very friendly and most helpful. Feel free to subscribe to any of the mailing lists and fire away any questions you have.