Why Anti-Zope FUD should be avoided

While perusing my blogroll this morning, I came across this article, titled "Why Zope should be avoided". Man, this guy really has a grudge against Zope - and that's okay, people are entitled to have grudges. But at least do your homework before you air them out in public.

Let's break some of it down, shall we?

The documentation available is incomplete, inaccurate and at best useless.

Ok, this one point actually registers on the validity scale, but only slightly. Documentation could be better, but it's hardly useless. The core Zope documentation is somewhat out of date, but there's still plenty of good information there. Add-on product documentation is usually very helpful, and tools like DocFinderTab, or any other introspection tool, go a long way in filling in the blanks.

There’s no newsgroups, at all

Other than the 110 Zope mailing lists mirrored as newsgroups via Gmane?

There’s not any discussion forums available, not even any unofficial.

Mailing lists and newsgroups are discussion forums.

Whether you install it on FreeBSD or Linux makes a huge impact if it’s going to work or not. The best you can do if you ever get it to work is to never change platform.

"./configure && make && make install" seems to work just fine for me on any *nix system I've ever used, and the Windows installers "just work".

Zope is not compatible with newer or older versions of itself. Thus upgrading can trash everything and should be avoided at all costs.

I'm not too sure about this one.. I seem to recall some sort of incompatibility between ZODB versions a while back, but it never bit me. I think it's safe to say that all of the Zope sites out there, including this one (which "miraculously" survived an upgrade from Zope 2.8.x to 2.9.x and a move from FreeBSD to Linux), weren't rebuilt from scratch after each upgrade. If your stuff gets trashed during a Zope upgrade, you probably didn't read the release notes.

Bugs are at best documented and unsolved.

Some get fixed, and some don't. This is no different from any other software project. Sorry if your bugs don't make the cut.

And if you’re lucky, submitting a bug can result in some poor soul making a hotfix for you.

Yes, that really sucks, having some unpaid developer donate his time to give you a hotfix instead of making you wait until the next release. Bad developer.. BAD!

All source code is stored in a specially created Zope database and inaccessible from outside the Zope manager, thus making it impossible to salvage source from a crashed installation. 

Right. I guess all of those filesystem *.py files in your Zope installation are there to impress the ladies, since all of the source is in the database.

When the database goes corrupt everything is lost. Even backups of the database is not safe enough, as the backup of the database can be incompatible with your new Zope.

So, install the version of Zope appropriate for your backups, restore your data, then upgrade the right way. Then make a new backup.

Also, the virtual files in the Zope database are owned by Zope users, and if you happen to remove a user you might end up with a broken website, since the files that was owned by that user no longer are accessible.

What, you deleted your admin account?

You need to write your code using forms and submit buttons, no room for any nifty IDE here. Ever method you create becomes a file in the Zope manager. This obviously makes it difficult to have a good documentation since you need to click and open every method to see what it does. And since the documentation is incomplete and incorrect you can get stuck on the most trivial of tasks.
If you’ve never tried it, think of it as using WordPress as your development IDE.

If you were "working with Zope as an application server and development platform for almost 3 years" and never learned how to do application development on the filesystem, then I think I understand your frustration. 

There aren’t many consultants available with the knowledge in Zope. 

You mean, other than the 225 listed here, the 91 listed here, and the many hundreds of freelance developers and consultants, myself included, who aren't listed in either of those locations? If you're having that much trouble finding an available Zope consultant, it's because we're all in demand. :-)

I guess it's easy to criticize something when you don't have your facts straight. In defense of the original article, I'll say that the author's experience might have been better if the Zope documentation situation was better. But there are thousands of us out there, using Zope successfully for our projects every day - and that wouldn't be the case if Zope weren't a solid platform. If you've tried Zope in the past, and have abandoned it for any of the reasons outlined in the article I've quoted here, maybe you just need to dig a little bit deeper.

Or hey, just use what works best for you. To each his own. For me, that's Zope.