[Zope] Looking for info...

[David Mitchell]

Hello everyone,

I've been lurking for the past week or so and have read a sizeable chunk of 
the archives of the mailing list.  I should explain that I've got a fair 
background in Web development (Perl CGI and related stuff, Microsoft 
ASP/MTS/COM and various J2EE tools), and a reasonable background in Python as 
well.  At the moment, I'm trying to get my head around how the various bits 
of Zope hang together, and put together a personal list of which bits of Zope 
to focus on now and which bits to leave till later.

Reading through a huge pile of messages, I've formed the following 
impressions:
- ZPT is viewed as "the way of the future".  I like the separation between 
content and presentation aspect, I like the fact that I can use Dreamweaver 
to create and edit templates, overall I like the concept of ZPT a lot
- while DTML isn't going to go away any time soon, there seems to be at least 
a mindshift away from it at present.  Same for ZClasses
- consensus seems to be that page rendering using ZPT & TAL is a bit slower 
than using DTML.  This is obviously a generalisation, but appears to be a 
consistent theme of the messages from several people.  I haven't yet seen 
anything like "it's 30% slower" or "it's 80% slower" yet
- there's lots of support for implementing business logic in external Python 
scripts vs. any other standard Zope options
- most people seem to be using Zope for content management sites, as distinct 
from e.g. e-commerce, app hosting.  To me, Zope looks like it should be 
particularly good for app hosting as it has version control, user-level 
security and state management out of the box, but I can't recall reading a 
message from anyone using it for that

Here's what I'm struggling to find:
- any structured info on using Python to access Zope's internals.  I've found 
lots of code snippets to perform specific tasks (e.g. create a folder), but 
so far nothing like a "cookbook".  Something broadly equivalent to the "DTML 
to ZPT" page at www.zopelabs.com, or the "METAL for beginners" and "ZPT 
simple tutorial" pages at www.zope.org, would be great
- anything on hosting Java applets or Active/X controls using Zope.  Given 
the amount of non-Zope sites that use this stuff, I'd be very surprised if 
there's no Zope sites doing the same, but I can't find any info at all
- info on relational database performance issues such as connection pooling 
between sessions.  There's a body of (non-Zope) information on how to design 
efficient database-driven Web sites available on the Net, but I can't find 
any info on how to implement these designs using Zope
- info on why creating a Zope Product, as distinct from a bunch of folders, 
scripts, templates, etc., is A Good Thing.  I suspect I'm missing something 
obvious here...

Can anyone provide pointers to the above info, if it exists?

Thanks in advance

David Mitchell