Hello, Maik Jablonski of the german speaking Zope Users Group DZUG issued a pretty bleak outlook for the future of Zope. What are your oppinions? Here comes the translation of his oppoion:
Maik, what makes you look full of scepticism for the future of Zope?
Shortly said, the whole set of stupidities in connection with Zope3. It is a pretty bad state for a project, if it looms for years as the followup project on the horizon but in reality isn't one! I can't believe the fairy tales with the possible migration from Zope2 to Zope3. All the people which have dwelled more or less deeply into the Zope2 world, thereby having had an enormous learning curve and now running applications, will not be able to participate easily on the academic Zope3 train. The technic freaks who modell Zope3 are usually not application developers, which have to build and run working applications for real human users. The artifical not-yet-product Zope3 will sooner or later be distracting development efforts from Zope2 because Zope3 is "almost finished." That doesn't look not nice ... Further I see the problem that Zope probably has no real target group as an application server. The enterprise world is dominated by .Net and J2EE. Zope in its current form without a sensible documentation in conjunction with the drama about the english zope book doesn't help changing this. Scripting has arrived in the Java world by Groovy, so this isn't a reason for using Zope anymore. In the world of small and medium applications PHP is likely to stay, because it leads much faster to results. Zope is to complicated for this. For the CMS stuff we have Plone, but this is rather suited for handling some simplistic documents for the intranet rather then a nice internet representation. This is because customizing Plone isn't trivial at all and nobody want's to run web pages with standard underwear blue. OK, the colours can be changed easily, other features via CSS, etc. ... Maybe I'm simply sick of moving along within web browsers and the file system without a sensible IDE and documentation. Regards, Maik