> I'll chime in. I haven't done a lot of development in any of the environments > but have tinkered extensivly with Zope and PHP and perl CGI. > > I find Zope a lot easier to use, once you get your head wrapped around it. > This is getting easier to do as new tools, like the CMF, which I haven't > played with extensivly, are added. I tried using Enhydra but since I'm more > of a python programmer than a Java coder I had trouble wrapping my brain > around Enhydra. I love Java -- but it takes far to long to do anything useful in JSP if you code in the proper way. It is easy to get out of hand and make it hard to maintain or extend. Custom tags (taglibs) and such take a lot of work for minimal return. > > Compared to PHP, DTML (Zope's internal template language) is similar to PHP > but les complete. That's in part due to the fact that Zope "modularizes" > certain functions. Instead of having database commands in DTML it has DB > adapters that allow you to create a link object in the Zope Object DB that > hooks to your external DB (I've used PostgreSQL). Against these you can > create SQL query objects (ZSQL methods). These objects then "publish" the > results of a query as a python dictionary object (I think that's right). This > can be used as a variable in other DTML code. Come see Tim's presentation it > will explain this better I'm sure. ;-) I would love to go see it (I haven't yet met anybody on this list), but I am helping my Brother move on Saturday. > > I've tried a bunch of things and I keep coming back to Zope. Part of it is > python. I really like the language. Right now I'm experimenting with Zope, > WebDAV, and a couple of tools one publishes PDFs with python, the other > allows you to store MS Word docs as Zope objects and render them as HTML on > the fly. I am primarily a C++ programmer (Java is my second language of choice, I can use Visual Basic -- but don't like to admit to it because they want to cut my pay if I do :) and have considered looking into Python many times. I haven't gotton around to doing so yet. > > Sorry for rambling long on this one. > Jack > I am just starting to look at the "Zope Book", and it seems to be written quite well. Tom Veldhouse