On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 15:54, Iwan van der Kleyn wrote:
* Zope is often criticised for its perceived lack of documentation.
IMO, that's still a problem, despite some outstanding efforts.
Although the current Zope book seems to have improved greatly, I still miss a good reference guide/book on advanded topics (the Development Guide seems to have stuck at version 2.4 and is rather limited). Which book(s) can fullfill this role?
None that I'm aware of... in English, anyway. If you speak German or French, there may be other resources available to you.
* Zope seems to lack a dominant development methodology/paradigm.
There is no framework for Zope because Zope *is* a framework.
What shoudl I use in Zope? ZTP with Scripts? Or external Methods? ZCLasses? Products?
Skip ZClasses, first off. You'll probably do best to prototype with scripts/external methods and migrate to products. Whatever you use for logic, you'll be using templating (ZPT/DTML) throughout.
* Releated to the former question: ASP.NET and PHP (through Pear) excell in easy (fast!) form-based development. What functionality can Zope offer? I've seen some references to a " Formulator" product.
With Zope, you can instantiate and configure objects entirely through the web. File system access is required to *extend* Zope with new products, but most development *is* rapid *and* form-based.
* Plone seems to be all the rage. But is Plone usable as an application framework? Can I use Plone for form-based, data-driven applications?
Plone excels as a CMS. Plone might provide a *part* of a serious data-driven app, but you'll want to do most of the logic in plain Zope.
* And finally (which makes me come across somowhat like a Troll, sorry about that :-). What is the "life expectancy" of Zope?
Good question. What's the life expectancy of Python? Of web browsers?
Most of the hype regarding Zope seems to have died away somewhat.
Perhaps true. But I'll take *success* over *hype* any day. :-)
Recently its coming back in the slipstream of Plone.
Less cynically, you could say that Plone is the first well-deployed application to leverage Zope's power. It often takes years for platform technologies to spawn their killer apps.
But realistically, what are the chances of Zope being a *relevant* application platform in a couple of years time?
Zope has a solid corporate parent, strong ongoing development efforts, a vibrant user community, commercial support, hosting companies, service providers, and open source licensing. That which Zope lacks in two years could be created by any number of parties, including you. We don't have the raw numbers of PHP or Java. That means fewer books and sparser docs. But IMO the tool is good enough to justify the extra effort. Once you get the hang of a few idioms, the rest falls into place pretty easily and you stop missing the docs so much.
WIth "relevant" I mean: a platform which is well supported and keeps up with the compettition on *features*, not necessarilly market share.
Zope 3 may be of particular interest to you. It's a significant step toward maintaining long-term usefulness and relevance. It's not production-ready yet, but is far enough along you may wish to factor it into your long-term planning. Obviously, I'm a partisan, trying to be helpful anyway... :-) HTH, Dylan