I agree. This person is misguided and either a) Does not have the skills in Python the be able to understand properly what Zope can do and b) Have corporate requirements that go above and beyond what he expects from a package like Zope. I worked for Compuware's Uniface lab for some time and can say that he probably needs to spend the millions of USD to buy Uniface instead of complaining about Zope. It provides the logical layers between data and presentation that he speaks about with the security, but were comparing apples with elephants now. I would suggest he also be aware of Uniface's (multi)million line-plus of coding in their kernel, as opposed to Zope that is a small fraction of that. I'm a newbie myself and have built my own personal website entirely with ZSQl and DTML. As I learn Python, I go over the site and redo layers of it to fit the proper model that Zope can provide. I see no clear proof of his assertions against Zope as they certainly introspect that he has not taken the time to figure Zope out properly. Having worked for Tech Support at the Uniface lab, I've heard it all from customers. EVERYONE says how complex their application is... blah blah blah. 9 times out of 10, our specialists come back from the fields shaking their heads because the customers basically got caught in a corner by covering the exits with mountains made from mole-hills.... If your catch my drift.... Never blame the tools, screwdrivers can be useful for drilling holes, but only when you don't have a drill. Agreed, he has a point... I read his CV page about the MEMS exchange and albeit, Zope is probably not suited very well to his needs, since they made design decisions prior to Zope that greatly affect Zope's capabilities and behavior. But, he pays a great disservice to Zope users by not explaining this. I'm not a developer, so I'm not able to argue the tech attributes. I'm a project manager with little enough staff that I need to jump in myself here and there... and I love the experience of it. But the bottom line is that most tools like Zope can be exactly what you need providing the realization that certain steps need to be prepared first to align this decision. It sounds to me that he didn't have this opportunity and that's why Zope is downtrodden, but at Zope's expense, and not his own, which it should be. Unfortunate, but most development projects will undergo this 'rebuilding requirements' phase several times before getting it right. Its just unfortunate that he doesn't depict it as so. Paz -----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of matt Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 4:27 AM To: Win GO; zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] zope rant Seems very misguided, and I think perhaps he is just very confused. For one thing putting ZClasses and Zope Products in the same category dosen't make sense to me. I tend to write a lot of Zope products as python modules and with that I get grep, I get CVS, I get test suites ... in fact there are tutorials around somewhere that show you how to run ZPublisher for debugging, it's an easy step to build the test suite around that. Next the talk about "Much of the application ends up as DTML" ??? that goes against most people's Zope philosophy, where DTML is a presentation layer ..... if you are writing your application in DTML and it works then well done!! but I wouldn't want to debug it. There is also this confusion with "dynamic scope", one of the most fantastic things about Zope is implicit acquisition. Sure it takes a bit to get a feeling for, but once you are there you start to organise your hierachies of attributes and methods into an environment that makes sense, and which is very powerful. If he is trying to build as they say "complicated objects", then through-the-web DTML is not really what they should be trying to do. Writing a python product would be the more obvious path. And if he/she finds editing in a Netscape text box so horrible for dtml and PythonMethods, then perhaps they could use their favourite editor and the nice FTP server that Zope comes with ... :-) Matt