Why Not Zope ?

I was surfing Scoble and ran across this:

Jon Udell says "Today, there are still far too few Joe Professional Programmers who get what Zope is." [_Go_]

That actually doesn't surprise me a bit.  I certainly fall into that category and I've looked at it and stuck with PHP.  I even know and respect a lot of people who use it.  So why?  For myself, I see Zope's reliance on its built in object database as a huge drawback.  And I know lots of people will disagree with me on this but I'm a professional.  I want my tools to be reliable.  And I simply don't trust object databases.  Period.  I've worked with everything from the old fashioned Smalltalk/V image files which crashed to ObjectStore which crashed to Poet which crashed.  And don't even get me started on the lack of utilities and tools for fixing crashed object databases.

Now I'll be the first one to admit that an RDBMS isn't elegant.  Moving data in and out of tables is a pain.  But you know what?  I know it works.  I know it scales.  I know there are tons of tools out there to help me if there's a problem.  Are any of those true for Zope?  Not in my opinion.

Zope?  Been there.  Looked at it.  Pass.  For those who like it, I'm cool with you using it.  Its just not for me.

Note: This doesn't in any way mean I don't like Python.  Guido's done great work on Python and I like it a lot.  It also doesn't mean I don't like objects which I do.  I'm objecting to a central core element of Zope which it is reliant on.  And I understand that Zope can move information to and from an RDBMS quite well.  But I simply don't trust the overall system.

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Its Just a Little HTML Editing...

Yeah -- 4 hours later.  Ah HTML.  Such a deceptive little language.  You go to reposition something up a little bit on the screen and when all is said and done, you ultimately do succeed but you've managed to beat your head bloody in the process.  This was just plain nasty HTML, convoluted tables (they're still not perfect) along with Cold Fusion and JavaScript source mixed in.  Oh and it pulls in XML formatted text over the net in real time (part of the problem).  And of course it was hurry up and rush. 

Seriously though, we just got the new Rock Library home page up and I'm pleased.  While not perfect, its a big improvement over the previous.  [_Go_]

Note to Self: Never ever believe "Its Just a Little HTML Editing"

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Cool Session Title

Here's a cool session title: Dr. Strangeresult or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Unit Testing.  This is George's PHP Con presentation.  [_Go_]

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RSS Shell Integration

Chris has some neat ideas on RSS integration right into the Windows shell:

Imagine this: a "News" submenu sitting at the top of your Start Menu, right above the Programs submenu. It cascades out into an organized list of feeds (each feed has its own folder). [_Go_]

Definitely interesting.  My only concern would be performance.  I have a quite large Start menu without this and its already slow.  I can just imagine would it would be like with feeds streaming in all the time.  Microsoft's whole shortcut based shell concept is cool and all but its damn slow.

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Anyone Heard of Relata

One of my customers was asking me about Relata and I was curious to know if anyone else has heard of it.  Its an Open Source PHP app for customer relationship management (CRM).  [_Go_]

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