On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 3:45 PM, Chris McDonough <chrism@plope.com> wrote:
So it seems like a good idea to explicitly distinguish the set of packages that BFG uses from "the ZTK" by giving the bicycle repair toolkit a name and saying that the ZTK depends on that, if only to give another "target point" in a diagram that includes frameworks that don't use the entire ZTK. "ZCA" seems good enough to me, although I don't really care what it's called.
I think ZCA as in Zope Component Architecture defines quite well what BFG currently uses internally. It could be interesting to see if we can come up with better definitions of what micro-frameworks the ZTK is composed of. What kind of bags of technologies do we have that offer some consistent and useful feature? The ZCA seems to be one of those and the ZODB is another that has some identity to it. Possible other features could be: schemas object publishing traversal / location security / authentication page templates / tal i18n catalog / indexes web server (server, processlifetime) caching (ramcache, cache descriptors) mail handling browser components (pages, resources, menus) pluggable browser components (contentproviders, viewlets) form components (formlib) persistent components (container, copy/paste, lifecycleevent) persistent relationships (intid, keyreference) This list isn't all inclusive and it's not really clear what package belongs to which of these grous. The relationship between these and their dependencies isn't all too clear either. But I think if we want to create documentation or some identity and community around things, it makes more sense to do so on this kind of higher level than trying to do that on the level of our current packages. It's probably too early to do this yet and the community will focus first on getting BlueBream off to a great start and allow Grok to finish its move to the ZTK. This is just what Tres and Chris have been hinting at, when we talked about the term "framework" and what that really is :-) Hanno