[Zope] from php to zop

[Adrian-Bogdan Andreias]

Hi Zopistas,

I'm planning to migrate our company web development from PHP to Zope.
The reason is to increase productivity by using a modern language, a
powerful framework with out of the box functionality and take care of
enterprise concerns (transactions, OO db, complex auth&auth system etc).

There's obviously a learning curve. But the questions are if
zope/python/plone will really increase productivity and if Zope is mature
enough.

I have a strong C++ and other OOP languages background, so using OOP is not
an issue even of we're moving from PHP.
I have some knowledge of UML and played a bit with Python a few years ago.

After watching wetfeet.mov I was very impressed. But then tried to follow
the tutorial my self, but got stuck with some error:
E:\Program Files\ArchGenXML>ArchGenXML.py E:\projects\zope\tt2.xmi
<...stack trace ... >
  File "E:\Program Files\ArchGenXML\XMIParser.py", line 697, in
getAttributeValu
e
    return el.firstChild.nodeValue
AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'nodeValue'

The big issue, besides the error itself, is that I wasn't able to fix the
problem after 2-3 hours of googling and so.
There's probably some stupid error in the UML model. I tried to see if there
are extra spaces in tags (like "required ") or some extra association/tag
that is not linked. But got stuck. I've redone the model from scracth,
though this is not an option in real world development.

This is not a Zope problem necessarily. But to be productive in Zope one
needs good tools that work.

Other issues that make me think Zope may not be that mature:
- I've read the first 150 pages of The Zope Book by now, and found to much
errors (grammatical and logical); some example are not actually working
because they missed a letter or so; I have the list of errors if someone
that works on the PDF is interested
- funny comments in the book from other readers (this and that is not
working etc.)
- clearly ZMI can not be used for development, but rather for administrative
tasks and quick dev fixes; can you post the list of tools you're using for
Zope development (e.g. eclipse, argouml, software X for WebDav etc.)

Some other questions about Zope:
- Zope and Plone are clearly for Enterprise projects, but do you think they
are suited as well for other smaller projects like: feeds aggregator web
sites (like technorati.com, but not that complex), custom web directories
(like DMOZ, but a bit more complex), other small projects
- is there some migration guide, that also talks about tools that I've asked
about above

I found some very interested concepts in Zope architecture, like
acquisition, I love the core architecture as far as I read.
Zope has great potential for sure, but is it in a state that can offer
productivity boost when compared with PHP?

These were some random thoughts :). It would help me a lot with the decision
of moving to Zope or not.

Thanks and sorry for the "speling"


-- 
Adi Andreias
adi _at_ elvsoft (dot] com
Elvsoft, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Online success
http://www.elvsoft.com/
Tel/Fax: +40 0364 103 430
Mobile: +40 0723 450 566
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