I've written several business apps in Zope and would suggest one best practice right off the bat: acquire more experience with your tools. Not to be discouraging, but you'll need more than passing familiarity with your development environment before you take on programming any reasonably important business system. Yes, payroll software can be done in Zope. Yes, it's even a good idea. But I would encourage you not to make a payroll system your first major project... in *any* language or environment. Particularly not if you're operating under any kind of deadline or expectation of useful results. As for frameworks, Zope *is* a framework and a very powerful one at that. Virtually anything Zope doesn't already do can be done with Python products. Read a good book on programming with Python (O'Reilly's Learning Python 2nd Ed. is my recommendation). Then read the Zope Developer's Guide (http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZDG) at least three times. Develop a product that exposes a basic interface and can return functional administration screens using either ZPT or DTML. Give yourself at least a month or two to do all this. At the point where you're weighing issues more technically nuanced than whether DTML is evil (it isn't), I think you'll probably find a lot of help available for any ambitious projects you may be ready to take on. HTH, Dylan At 12:50 PM 12/9/2002, you wrote:
Hi,
I'm back to playing with Zope, except this time I need it as a tool to rewrite business apps (payroll, in this case.) I've read the New Riders book along wit the online Zope Book. I understand that DTML is evil and that new users should prefer ZPT.
Anyway, is there a good document for newbies that come from procedural languages like VB that would show them how to get up to speed? I need to understand how to separate logic and presentation as cleanly as possible. I'm actually still wondering which framework to use (Midgard, Enhydra, etc.)
Thx Fred.
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