Tres Seaver wrote:
AT has the classic "Z-shaped curve" in spades: when it does what you want, it is great, but trying to get it to do something else is painful and frustrating.
I don't agree all that often with Chris W, but I find Archetypes an extremely frustrating framework to work with, an normally avoid it even when building out sites with it.
Out of curiosity, what types of things are you trying to do that you find frustrating?
It is not exactly a secret that the Archetypes codebase is a mess; its original authors have abandoned it, pretty much. There are some hardy souls who will fix bugs in AT, but nobody has stepped up to the problem of making it play nice with other frameworks, or making it more maintainable.
Archetypes has actually received more love (where "love" typically means making it use things like Zope 3 style vocabularies and subscription adapters for validation) over the Plone 3 release than in a long time. There are various developers in the Plone community who are capable of maintaining it, myself included, and we have a new overall maintainer in Daniel Nouri.
Trying to find a more palatable replacement for AT is a perfectly reasonable goal.
Definitely. The longer term roadmap for Archetypes mirrors that of Zope itself. Refactor the internals (e.g. transformation engine, reference engine - both of which are ongoing and will probably land in Plone 3.5; starting to use Zope 3 style widgets internally is another favourite pet peeve of mine) to rely on more general components which do not make assumptions about content objects being AT objects. The part of Archetypes that most people see (the schema, the base classes) are actually fairly agnostic and could be viewed as just another spelling of something like a Zope 3 schema + a formlib form. The challenge is that 90% of add-on Plone products probably rely on Archetypes. We're not about to break them. :) That's a testament to AT's success, and we see lots of developers who don't have a very deep grasp on the full Zope stack being very productive with Plone+Archetypes. Sometimes, like you say, they try to use it for things that it's not so well suited for, and for sure it can be difficult to migrate to layers lower down the stack in that case. That's all part of the volution, though - there's a lot of "history" in the AT codebase. :) Cheers, Martin -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/ZClassNG-proposal--makes-Archetypes-Easy.-tf3627364.ht... Sent from the Zope - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.