[Zope] PHP vs Zope

Nikolai Vladychevski niko@netspace.com.mx
Wed, 22 Mar 2000 09:20:39 -0600


Very intersting stuff ... I think I will need finaly to try Zope my self
to see how it is. But I have one more question, why they decided to base
Zope on Python and not other language?

Regards
niko

"Eric W. Sink" wrote:
> 
> In a technological sense, comparing PHP and Zope is a little bit silly,
> since they are so very different.  In a practical sense, comparing them
> is extremely reasonable, since there are a wide variety of web development
> tasks which can be approached with either PHP or Zope.
> 
> Performance comparisons are the toughest.  PHP is no slouch -- it is used
> for some very high traffic sites, including freshmeat.net and lots of
> others.
> 
> Zope, on the other hand, offers some features which will cause it to
> outperform stock PHP in many cases.  PHP is a scripting language for
> website development.  In contrast, Zope is described as an application
> server.  As such, Zope includes features like pooling of database
> connections and caching of database query results.  These are not
> as easy to do in technologies like PHP, and they can make a huge
> difference in the performance of database-driven sites.  We
> implemented www.CodeCatalog.com twice -- once in Zope, and once in
> PHP.  The Zope version ended up much, much faster.  Your mileage
> may vary.
> 
> I'm pretty sure it's possible to get good performance from PHP and
> Zope, if your situation is appropriate and you're willing to work at
> it.
> 
> I am equally sure that it's pretty easy to get lousy performance from
> either PHP or Zope, if your situation is especially inappropriate, and
> you're willing to live entirely off the low hanging fruit.
> 
> There are lots of other comparisons which could be made, and have been
> made.  These comparisons tend to degenerate into flamewars pretty quickly,
> although I see no reason for this to happen.  Objective comparisons
> of two technologies like this are useful.  I happen to like both, although
> Zope certainly gets an increasing share of my attention.
> 
> Zope's three-tiered architecture and web-based authoring tends to make
> the tool more approachable by people who may be less technical, and
> more annoying to hardcore programmers who find they have a new paradigm
> to learn.  The gap between the experiences of these two groups of
> people tends to narrow very quickly as people start to grasp the soul
> of what Zope is all about.  People who are learning Zope tend to
> periodically burst out of their office with a desperate need to
> tell someone about the latest core principle of Zope which they finally
> came to understand.  The more you have these "light bulb" experiences,
> the cooler Zope is.
> 
> PHP isn't like that.  It's an excellent tool, but it's really just
> a scripting language.  It isn't everything that Zope is, and it
> doesn't try to be.
> 
> Compare PHP to Python
> 
> Compare Zope to Midgard.
> 
> BTW, the safest way to do those comparisons is *probably* to do them
> somewhere other than on this mailing list.  :-)
> 
> --
> 
> >Hello,
> >I recently started to work with php (+ Apache), and now I found Zope. At
> >the first sight, Zope seems to be faster than php, but I don't know if
> >it's my php application that is not so complex than Zopes objects. So I
> >would like to ask, is there a benchmarks or articles or any sources that
> >discuss about performance and developing PHP versus Zope? Also, i am
> >cuirious, was Zope developed to replace PHP in the future? And what if
> >PHP comes up with an interface like Zope, so what would be better? Many
> >questions, isn't it ....
> >
> >Any comments are welcome.
> >
> >Thanks.
> >Nikolai
> >
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> 
> Eric W. Sink, Software Craftsman
> SourceGear Corporation
> eric@sourcegear.com