Hi Graham, On Sat, 16 Feb 2002, you wrote:
Perhaps it would be useful to indicate on the companion website webdev.zopeonarope.com what no longer works under 2.5
Even better, we hope to be posting updates, fixes, or workarounds for anything that stops working with newer versions of Zope, or for whatever reason. In fact, this process has already begun. See the chapter two folder on the web site, for example.
and which parts that have been emphasized in the book are no longer relevant.
Relevance is a pretty subjective quality, and has everything to do with the tools that an individual selects. If a tool still works and is performing some useful task for someone, that seems quite relevant, especiallly to that person.
I've been trying to follow Chapter 12, but find that emarket is a broken product, and apparently from what you say above, zpatterns is to be superceded soon.
Thanks to your feedback, Steve will be looking at emarket right away. More details of the problems you've encountered would greatly aid that effort. ZPatterns has been called "obsolete", "a retired package", and probably things even less inspiring. On the other hand, the term I find most useful to describe a package that has reached such a stage in its life cycle is "stable". Just because ZPatterns isn't the hottest agenda item of the originators anymore, doesn't mean that it has ceased to provide benefit to those who have climbed the learning curve and implemented production systems. Lots of folks are still running Linux 2.2, even though there are some nice features available in the 2.4 kernel. However, there are also some showstoppers hiding in 2.4, for certain users, and 2.4 is still pretty darn good for most purposes. I sincerely hope that the Zope 3 components model catches on, and makes life easier for many Zope developers, but experience leads me to suspect that things will continue to evolve for the foreseeable future. There is probably no way around this continual churn, and after all the ultimate goal is an ever improving Zope. Still, it can be frustrating for the garden variety Zope fan who really just needs to get things working, and to be able to count on them to remain in that state. If Zope 3 is the ticket, super. If ZPatterns gets you there, who can ask for more than that? Sometimes the latest thing != the greatest thing, in terms of net productivity.
-- Graham Chiu
Thanks for your interest, Jerry S.