Java Miscellaneous: Zope/CMF

• barrygaunt / 302 / Sat, 23 Jan 2010 14:18:00 GMT / Comments (7)
• Anyone into Zope?How does it compare/compete with J2EE ?-Barry
• Keywords:

  zope, cmf, java

• http://java.itags.org/java-tech/99603/«« Last Thread - Next Thread »»

• 1. Come on you guys, nobosy? The thing is implemented in Python ya know!
     -Barry

     barrygaunt | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:21:00 GMT |

  2. I have played with Zope a few times, and found it very interesting. Not being a keen Python programmer, I've tended to mine Zope for ideas rather than use it directly, though.

     Do you have an application in mind that you would like to implement using Zope?

     frankcarver | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:22:00 GMT |

  3. Thanks Frank , but I was making a bid for the freebie book a few weeks back! Fell flat
     -Barry

     barrygaunt | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:23:00 GMT |

  4. i'm going to invite some zopistas I know to comment on this thread. I'm sure they'll have plenty to say, if they choose to say anything at all.

     mikecurwen | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:25:00 GMT |

  5. Some things in Zope seem just great ideas. Reading about "acquisition" in Zope really helped crystalise my understanding of how I wanted my dynamic web applications to behave. Opening up all the configuration to the same web interface as the application is another stunningly simple and effective idea which I now routinely use. For some of these things I have effectively reimplemented some of Python's elegant "everything is a Map/Dictionary" philosophy.

     On the other hand, I'm too comfortable with the idea of preparing my own self-contained deployable J2EE web applications to move over to the Zope "uber container" with built-in database and user/application management. I'm also not a fan of the Zope page template syntax - I prefer my template substitutions to be orthogonal to the HTML syntax, not intertwined with it.

     I'd love to hear how others think about this kind of question.

     frankcarver | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:26:00 GMT |

  6. Hey all, one of Mike's Zope buddies here...

     As Frank mentioned, the acquisition and built-in mananagement interface are great parts of Zope. The former gives a natural form of inheritance, and combined with the simple user interface means that people with little training can manage or create some of their own stuff fairly easily, without having to get too technical. Like it or not, this matters. In any case, you need to administer your site somehow, and this comes for free. Works remotely too of course, so prodding via a login shell is much less common.

     The acquisition applies to all objects, so things like security settings which apply to a subfolder are trivial, and include fairly fine-grained, role-based ACLs. These are quite powerful, in that you can delegate just the permissions needed for a particular sub-folder. This means that other people can do the work there, leaving you to do the complex bits that are more fun.

     Hmm, what else? Well, the modularity of the system rocks! What I mean here is that it is simple for developers to turn their module into a "Product", which is basically an encapsulated chunk which has properties, methods and editing forms, and which the end-user can just drop wherever convenient. Essentially, the developer has to add a few things, but then Joe User can just pick it up and go. The difference here is that between giving a kid a doll house vs a Lego set; one might have an acceptable set of canned features, but is hard to re-use or re-purpose. The latter provides building blocks which other (often non-techie) folks can mix and match to create new, sophisticated things easily.

     There is more to all this of course, but I'll just leave a URL for a few hundred of these Lego blocks created by and for the community: http://www.zope.org/Products

     [ January 29, 2003: Message edited by: Tim Lavoie ]

     timlavoie | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:26:00 GMT |

  7. Thanks, everyone, for your responses. Man there's so much GOOD stuff there, and so little time...
     -Barry

     barrygaunt | Tues, 15 Jul 2008 17:28:00 GMT |