[Zope] Front door on the Zope web site (Was Re: [Zope] SmartW orker)

Jay, Dylan djay@lucent.com
Thu, 28 Oct 1999 15:59:23 +1000


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Oleg Broytmann [mailto:phd@phd.russ.ru]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 1999 22:57
> To: Paul Everitt
> Cc: Zope Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [Zope] Front door on the Zope web site (Was Re: [Zope]
> SmartWorker)
> 
> 
> On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Paul Everitt wrote:
> > This is a very, very important thread to me.  I'm looking for two
> > things:
> > 
> >   o What questions should the Zope.org home page, and pages 
> >     one click away, answer?
> > 
> >   o What are some effective ways to answer those questions?
> 
>    Currently Zope.org oriented primarily toward Zope 
> developers. If you
> want to restructure the site to attract business eyes, I think the
> following questions are important:
> 
>    Q1. Frontdoor: What is Zope, how it can improve your business, why
> opensource platform better suites your needs.
> 
> 
>    And some parts of answer for Q1:
> 
>    <B>Zope</B> is <small>free, open-source</small> component-based
> object-oriented <B>Web application platform</B>.
> 
>    Zope can improve your business by allowing you to develop your Web
> applications easily, with rights tools. Zope is free, thus making your
> applications cheaper. Zope is open-sourced, thus allowing 
> your developers
> to understand every aspect of its internals. Zope conforms to 
> standards.
> Zope talks HTTP/FTP/WebDAV/FastCGI/etc protocols.

I think you need more detail than that. In a seminar I was going to give to
the lucent web comunity (but due to funding this fell though), I put a lot
of thought into what were the main advantages for my use of Zope. I came up
with the following:

· Maintainability through ZOPE's unique object database that enables a
natural separation of data, business logic and presentation, allowing
flexible 3-tier architectures.
· Support for code reuse and 3rd party plug-in functionality.
· Robust and high performance integrated SQL database support that makes
creating dynamic data-driven applications simple.
· Web based collaborative authoring.
· No downtime when making large changes through use of versioning.
· The advantages of using an open source and cross-platform technology.
· Data intergrety through intergrated transactions.

I think since Zope is coming from a more underdog position, a good analysis
of where it is better than the 'comercial' competition would be good.