[lug] Is Zope ready for prime time?

[Jonathan Corbet]

> My preference would be Zope, for ease of development.
> Do you have experience ... is Zope reliable and secure?

In my experience, Zope has a lot of great stuff, but once you try to get
past the "through the web" interface the complexity of the system gets
overwhelming.  I was planning to use Zope for LWN, and had put together a
reasonably functional system using CMF and such.  Then I got pulled away
for a few months.  When I got back to it, I didn't understand my own code
any more.

I don't like it when I don't understand my own code.  One of the reasons I
like Python is that it's usually easy to figure out what's going on, with
my code or somebody else's.  So it was dismaying to be mystified by stuff I
wrote, and to be once again going through the process of trying to figure
out where to actually find my objects hidden behind layers of acquisition
wrappers and such.

So I started over with Quixote and haven't looked back.  I still think Zope
has a lot of great qualities, and it's a great platform to build a
consulting business on top of.  But, before you decide to build your
application on top of it, do spend some time looking at the code and,
perhaps, putting together a quick proof-of-concept module.

jon