Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Cocoon
Author: Paul Snively Posted: 12/27/1999; 10:02:59 AM Topic: Today's scriptingNews Outline Msg #: 13906 (In response to 13897) Prev/Next: 13905 / 13907
Dave Winer wrote:"Looks more and more like Cocoon is reinventing the wheel. Why don't they use Zope??"
I can think of several reasons that I perceive as valid--YMMV.
- Cocoon's primary focus is to be a publishing system based on emerging W3C standards, particularly XSLT. Zope, if only because it predates several of these emerging standards, seems not to rely on/support their use, having its own document object model, template language, etc.
- Despite some of the verbiage on the Cocoon site, there's no indication in reality that Cocoon has content management as a goal in the same sense/to the same extent that Zope, Frontier, Spectra, StoryServer... do. For example, there's no discussion of WebDAV support. This also puts Cocoon in contrast with, e.g. Resin, whose "Future" section observes: "Quercus 1.0 will be a collection of useful Java libraries, XSL stylesheets and scripts. It may turn into a full-fledged content management system like Zope."
- Cocoon came from the Java Apache project, so not surprisingly, it's Java-based. The investment and momentum behind Java on the server is staggering. Even more staggering, it's paying off. Thanks largely to IBM, there are very-good-to-excellent JVMs for every credible server platform I can think of. While Python is, in fact, my favorite of the broad-based (UNIX, Windows, Mac) "scripting" languages, it still doesn't enjoy anything like the breadth and depth of support that Java does.
Zope's a fantastic system, and for folks who are already Python fans or who are literally starting from scratch and don't mind being effectively self-contained within the Zope community (meaning, finding resources--e.g. hiring people who already have Zope experience--will be difficult), I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it.
Otherwise, though, it seems wisest to look at system based on the W3C standards, whether they're commercial systems (ECential™, Total-e-Business™) or open source (Resin, Cocoon).
And being Java-based is helpful both in terms of the quality of the available technology and in terms of the availability of resources, human and otherwise.
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