Is there any prospect of some form of friendlier developer GUI to Zope, perhaps a Java client. Features such as Syntax highlighting of DTML, and a better error description system, would greatly enhance the ease of use of Zope. Further, such a system would not need to replace the present HTML interface, but could be used optionally. I may be showing my newbieness here, but I guess a good first step might be a Java conduit to the Zope database - perhaps one already exists.
I am not knocking the hard work that developers have put into the system, however I suspect these are the questions that many Zope newbies will be asking.
This is something that has been rumbling since the earliest days of Zope. On the one hand, a huge part of the Zope story is "through- the-web". On the other, HTML (as we are all well aware) is a pretty restrictive user interface. Aside from the amount of time and effort required, I think one thing that has kept any serious efforts at a native or Java applet UI from happening is the fact that no matter what you implement or how well it is done, there are still going to be a significant number of people who don't like it and won't use it because "its not their tool". People understandably have differing tools preferences (emacs, dreamweaver, the list is endless). In light of this, we have tried to take a standards-based "maximum interoperability" approach. Our approach to date has been to provide support for things like FTP, WebDAV, and XML-RPC in an effort to work with as many standards-based clients as possible. We are also keeping an eye on developments in the Mozilla community, and the things they are working on look like they could be very promising as a foundation for eventually providing a much more usable and robust interface to Zope without losing the benefits of the through-the-web model. Such a thing would fit better with our standards-based approach than a totally non-std java interface, and using XUL and some of the other Moz technologies would allow Zope to provide a rich interface and still remain easily customizable. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com