[Zope] A Newbie question

[rgines@purina.com]

>Hi,

> I have seen on the howtos how to let apache serve static pages,
>but I still haven't seen an answer to the following question:

>Suppose I already have a big site that uses perl/cshell. Now
>suppose I want to move to Zope but without loosing any of that
>site or even converting.

> What would the best solution be?

I am assuming  that Apache is already your 'Front End'.   Even if
it is not, not a big deal.

> Example:

> www.foo.bar is a huge site.

> I want to move to Zope but wish to keep the site as is, only
>add zope objects with time. In other words, 90% of the site
>will stay static as is for a long time. How would you start this thing?

At my largest client I have a single Apache server which is front ending
probably close to a dozen differenct web server serives running on various
classes of machines.   Quite a few of them are just linked with their
normal URLs, but others are routed through Apaches proxy functions.

Let's say that the main site is www.foo.bar as you suggested and you
have Zope running under www.foo.bar:8080.   If you had a directory
under Zope that you wanted to serve called zoot, the normal URL of
course would be www.foo.bar:8080/zoot.   With the proxy functions
you can redirect the URL www.foo.bar/zoot to point to www.foo.bar:8080/zoot
and your end users are non-the-wiser for it.

Is there a performance hit?   Yes, a little.  The sites that I work on
under
this arrangement are not high traffic sites by any stretch of the
imagination,
but they do serve important information to a select group.   This allows
us to have what looks like a seemless environment even though it is a
function of Zope/Apache/IIS(ugh!!)/DominoGo/AlkalineSearch/WebFocus
and other servers.

Hope this helps.