I was reading http://www.arielpartners.com/arielpartners/content/public/topics/technology/technologyReviews/zopeVsCocoon and it got me thinking. - TWiki really could do with being re-purposed into an ApplicationServer environment.

I haven't implemented this, but I was thinking perhaps Zope is the one to go for.

Some features of Zope (from the comparison) are stuff we were thinking about implementing:

• • Enhanced XPath interpreter: web-to-document/object navigation out of the box This is possible using Xindice enhanced XPath or the like.
  • Integrated FTP, WebDav?, and HTTP access to all content

Other stuff is nice to have:

• • Integrated Object-oriented database with support for full graphical editing of all objects out of the box
  • Seamless support for adding arbitrary metadata to all objects in the database.
  • Support for XML and XSLT Processing pipelines

Zope has ZWiki but it has little functionality, almost pathetic one might say.

Tosses idea in the air....

-- MartinCleaver - 08 Apr 2002

This seems to come up periodically, see the discussions last year about 'why not rewrite TWiki in Java, Python, etc'...

The stock answer to this is that if you really prefer whatever other language or environment, join one of the many Wiki projects that use that environment already and enhance it so that it has all of TWiki's functions. TWiki is now about 13,000 lines of Perl code including default plugins, and rewriting all of that in some other language or environment is rather unlikely, to say the least.

If you were to find a Perl application server that might be another idea, but it would massively increase the system requirements, meaning that it would be a separate project altogether.

-- RichardDonkin - 08 Apr 2002

I agree that TWiki could be considered an application server, I'm trying to use it in this way. I tried Zope and I was not satisfied. In particular, the fact that pages are stored into a database makes syncronization of sites difficult, and precludes (or makes difficult) the use of external programs (say latex2html).

See also AreWebsTopics for a related discussion.

-- FrancoBagnoli - 09 Apr 2002

Well, perhaps the thing to do then is to formally modularise and spin off parts of TWiki such that the core becomes just an ApplicationServer such that the rest become modules to it. I thin

It would help if there was a standard for Perl Application Servers, not least because that way the modules would be interchangeable. Something like J2EE is for Java.

-- MartinCleaver - 09 Apr 2002

See P5EE - Perl 5 Enterprise Environment

Maybe P5EE is so important it deserves own page?

-- PeterMasiar - 10 Apr 2002