Lennart Regebro wrote at 2009-4-12 17:18 +0200:
On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 08:51, Dieter Maurer <dieter@handshake.de> wrote:
I see myself rather as an application developer and conclude that Zope may no longer be adequate to build large applications on top of it -- applications that need to live and be maintained for many years to come.
Well, the existing Zope releases will not disappear or go away. The "worst" that can happen for you as a Zope 2 developer is that 2.12 becomes the last release. Is that really a problem?
I fear it is a problem: maintenance includes extensions based on the platform build so far. For these extensions, newer ways of doing things may be wanted.
But yes, the only developments in Zope 2 the last five years or so has been more inclusion of Zope Toolkit technologies. But without that Zope 2 would have stopped as 2.7, more or less. So if you don't use any of the component architecture, Zope 2 releases since 2.8 has been mostly pointless. And again: Is that a problem?
We skipped indeed Zope 2.9 and Zope 2.10 -- but my newer colleagues think they lost something. But, to be clear: I am not against providing modern Zope features in Zope 2. My objections are against instability of the interfaces for these features. For example: When upgrading from Zope 2.8 to Zope 2.11, I had to fight for several hours because Zope 3 interfaces have been changed: * a convenience method "getView" has been removed from "zapi". True, it did not do much over "getMultiAdapter", but it had a speaking name and why should a convenience method, even if considered a bit redundant, harm much? * skinning has been changed completely -- the former skin control methods have been removed I agree that the new skin control is better, but why not emulate the older methods with the newer ones? * in some signatures, the parameter order has changed. To be honest, the quite high amount of time was not only caused by the Zope 3 changes but also by stupidity in our application.
... In short, I'm not sure what you are worried about.
Increasing maintenance costs for long living applications caused by cosmetic changes in the Zope platform. -- Dieter