Some remarks from my side as a Zope2 core developer on this issue: The Z2 community and development is currently at a bad point: - very few people are contributing to the Z2 in terms of new code and bug fixes (see the tons of open bugs in the collector) - very few people are willing to contribute to documentation The reasons for this situation from my prospective: - Lots of Z2 people are working now on Plone projects. Plone currently attracts more people because the important and interesting projects are done there. Paul Everits goal to grow Zope by 10 times might happen through Plone, not through Zope itself - The Z2 development is badly managed. The 2.7 release has been delayed for one year or so. - ZC is currently the bottleneck for Z2. Several important people have left and I don't see any new blood there. I see that ZC is focusing on Z3 for the future. That is a legitimate goal from their own prospective but it does not reflect the needs of lots of users. Speaking for the company I am mainly working for have invest a lot time, code and money into Z2 development. E.g. our complete company-critical CMS is currently being rewritten on the base of Zope2. Several other products will be also Zope 2 based. Zope 3 is in the current stage not really an alternative for complex sites, portals and applications in the style we are working on. Z3 might become interesting if we have Plone-like functionality available. To speak with Maiks words: Z3 is attractive as an academic project to try out things and concepts but it does not attract people in the current stage...maybe in two years from now but currently most people are attracted by working and usable solutions like Plone. - The zope.org community site is a mess. Lots of outstanding problems are not fixed, the performance of the site is more than poor (it takes ages to login, it takes ages to load pages), usability (e.g. when you perform a software release) is bad. We need for Zope2 - a better and open management for Z2 releases: If ZC can not provide the resources in terms of time and manpower, the coordination and release management should be given to the community. I am sure that more are willing to contribute more than at the moment. Several companies maintain their own Zope version with lots of extensions and it would be fine to see this stuff in a common repository. - a clear statement from ZC to the future of Zope 2. Zope 2.8 and Zope 2.9 are considered as a migration path for Zope 3 where the Z2 support should be dropped after these releases (as far as I can remember the vision of Rob a while ago). Who will manage Z2 releases after dropping the Z2 support? The last solution would be a Z2 code fork if we can not come to common agreement on the Z2 future but a code fork would be really the last and absolutely worst solution for everyone. - Fix the most outstanding critical bugs on zope.org and speed it up. Zope.org is currently a very bad figurehead for Zope. If ZC can not solve the problems....either give the responsibility to other people or just close zope.org.
From my own prospective as developer I would like to see that Z2 development over the next two or three years continues because there is too much Z2 legacy code in the world and not everyone is interested in following the migration path for Z3. To be honest I doubt that large custom applications can be migrated with a justifiable amount of time and money (just because they are completely bound to Z2 components and its architecture).
To clarify my standpoint: I am not an opponent of Zope3 but Zope 3 does not convince me in the current stage and gives me little attraction for the projects I am working on....it just can not compete with Zope 2 if you are building large-scale systems at this time. Andreas ----- ZOPYX - Software Development & Consulting Andreas Jung www.zopyx.com -- Andreas Jung -------------------------------- www.zopyx.com Software-Entwicklung und Consulting Andreas Jung