Nick - I've done quite a bit of zope work for the past few years, so see below for a [long!] brain dump of some things to consider.
[the situation you describe of a zope shop considering possible move to rails is a pending issue for the company i'm working with right now, so i've been thinking about some of these issues anyway] Are they also looking at other python frameworks? e.g., TurboGears or Django seem to be the two main web frameworks currently evolving in the python world ~ Deb -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- First, depends on lot on what their app is, what aspects of zope/plone are important to them, what add-on zproducts they depend on. If they're heavily into content management or custom content types that's a bit different problem than if they're just using zope as their web site platform. Other factors: how much of their app is file-system based code vs. zope objects. What version of zope are they on and how much if any of the new zope3 technologies/rearchitecture are they using? How sophisticated is ther DB usage; are they just using ZSQL or are they using any of the python sql packages? Zope's user management and security model is very well done. This is IMO still an immature/evolving area in the Rails world (and yes, I know there are various plugins etc - of widely varying degrees of capability and maturity). If they make extensive use of these features this area would need some thought/investigation of how they'd replicate. Acquisition in Zope is amazingly cool and not something I've really seen anywhere else. Depending on the extent to which they exploit acquisition this could be a challenging aspect to rework. On the other hand, the Rails controller/helper facilities + inheritance + the routing mechanism provides some clean solutions and might cover what they do. Zope page templates are really nice. [if they're still using DHTML, well... anything is progress from there] I personally don't like .rhtml; I generally want to be able to work on my view templates as well-formed, valid (x)html documents that I can use std editing tools to work with but with notation that allows me to express the dynamic content that the runtime system provides. The ZPT approach using an attribute markup language is a nice way to solve this. [shameless plug: MasterView template engine - my solution to "ZPT for Rails". http://masterview.org, rubyforge project 'masterview'. I'm co-developer of this project; it's still evolving, call it say beta-level, but the core mechanism is fairly solid. Lets me do my templates s.t. erb is expressed w/in a complete, legal xhmtl document] That said, while I keep wanting to really like Zope, it's somehow just not quite... right. It too often seems to be a struggle to do things that seem like they should be simple. My initial experience with moving some simple sites to Rails has been that I get much better velocity in my work than I ever seem to get with Zope. Language issues: learning Ruby shouldn't be a big deal for a python programmer. The languages are very similar in a lot of ways. Ruby's syntax and conceptual space is a bit more "cluttered" than python's, but it's not that difficult an adjustment. Standard libraries: again, a lot of similarities, both provide pretty good coverage of a broad range of standard capabilities. Python libraries are probably generally more mature and perhaps support a broader range of add-ons (e.g., quite a bit of scientific stuff is done in python), but Ruby's core libs seem to be pretty solid as well. Rake and gems are quite fine; the python world is playing catchup there. Community and future prospects: zope just never quite caught on here in the US, it's got little niches but is generally much stronger in Europe. The Zope world is in the midst of a big shakeup in the fundamental system architecture (Zope 2 vs. Zope 3 redesign); most of the energy is more in the CMS and Plone areas, I think. Ruby and Rails has a lot of momentum and activity right now and the foundations being laid seem promising to support that going forward. -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Nick Zadrozny Sent: Friday, September 08, 2006 9:45 PM To: San Diego Ruby User Group Subject: [Sdruby] selling Ruby on Rails... So I'm putting together an email to sell a Python/Zope/Plone team on moving to Ruby on Rails. (I might be working with said team in the near future.) They're a small team, pretty agile and open to new technologies, but I don't have enough (read: any) experience with Zope and Plone to do much of a compare and contrast and build a list of pros and cons. Anyone here have any ideas or articles to share? -- Nick Zadrozny _______________________________________________ Sdruby mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sdruby.com/mailman/listinfo/sdruby _______________________________________________ Sdruby mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sdruby.com/mailman/listinfo/sdruby
