Re:About Zope (Score 2)

probably the most patently questionable statement that mr. greenspun offers is that ACS operates on a much higher abstraction/application level than zope. i'd like to hear some justification of that statement as i think that its quite opposite.

Good question. I work at ArsDigita with Philip, so I'll do my best to clarify his statement accurately.

The main point here is that ACS and Zope are, in many ways, apples and oranges: At the heart of ACS is a set of integrated data models that backend a variety of applications, e.g., discussion forums: there's a users table, where information about actual users of the ACS-backed site is stored, and there's tables that depend on users, e.g., user-contributed forum postings, comments on static pages, etc.

Contrast this with Zope: Browse the UML model for ZODB, and you'll find a DB class, a Connection class, a Transaction class, a Persistent class, but no DiscussionForum class or ForumPosting class.

This contrast doesn't suggest that ACS is superior to Zope. It just illustrates how ACS is different from Zope: Zope does deal with "lower" (i.e., closer to the computer) things like databases and object persistence, whereas ACS deals only with "higher" things like human beings and the things they say.

The term "higher" in this context is not meant to be a measure of quality. Rather, it refers to location in the stack of software layers that comprise a database-backed web app. ACS focuses on what goes into the "database" part of the problem, and Zope provides (among other things) a solution for the "-backed web app" part of the problem.

I don't think there's any reason why you couldn't take data models from the ACS and build a web app on top of it using Zope, instead of AOLserver.

I realize that this level of analysis is simplistic, but I hope that it helps to clarify Philip's statement about levels of abstraction.

in what way is ACS easy to program as a framework, and how well does it abstract away those details to those altering the application, designers/content managers? looking for some answers.

Another good question: The short answer is that the current version of ACS (3.2) does not provide tools that lets "designers/content managers" publish web pages on their own (though they can publish certain structured types of content like news items and press announcements). Zope, on the other hand, does.

One of our programmers in Berkeley (Karl Goldstein) actually developed a content management system in the course of building a site for one of our customers: PogoPet. Karl's system is in use on a number of ArsDigita-built sites, and our plan is to roll it back into the ACS this summer.