--On Wednesday, June 06, 2001 11:57:06 AM -0400 Paul Everitt <paul@digicool.com> wrote:
Hmm, I'm surprised that 2 days has passed with no comment from zope-dev and no comments in the Wiki. I hear constant complaints about lack of a polished API. I expected this post to generate lots of interest.
I read it over, the final design seems acceptable if docs are actually written to it. My main concern is the one that Chris McDonough expressed in great detail in the wiki, namely that definining the (existing) interfaces is THE critical step. Simply documenting all of the methods of objects is not sufficient because it says nothing about which are important, which are internal only, which are obsolete, how they interact, etc. The final design does base the API on hand-written interfaces, which is good. There is also some seemingly fuzzy plans to have an interface verification tool, which will be of some value in catching some cases of non-compliance. However, the vital hard bit of creating the hand-written interfaces and ensuring that they're right is sort of glossed over in my opinion. I thought of adding some of this to the wiki, but it all seemed to amount to a redundant "me too" and I wasn't sure where to put it :-( Following the spec for newly written products should be easier. The CMF seems to me to be a good example of a product that has done so (though the interfaces seem to be getting out of date at the moment). I have found online CMF API docs useful in practice. Dan Pierson