Fellow Zopistas: Just a note (although this begins to sound like a rant as I read it back, sorry!) to mention how surprised I was that even given the revamped Zope look n feel in 2.3.x, the "Quickstart" seems to still need a lot of updating! Isn't it likely that the first thing a newbie would do is read this and get really confused? There are a plethora of new concepts and especially new terms that have no definitions almost anywhere without a lot of looking around. Now anyone who has used Zope for a while and/or is familiar with the history of product development at DC will know some of this stuff, but it just adds to the confusion for new users. Some examples:
In App development/External Methods: "Pluggable brains" (sounds cool but daunting)
In The Almighty Lever "An exiting new development being worked on for Zope is The Lever... "
(I have been working with Zope for well over a year and still don't know what THIS is....) "Tabula or Aqueduct " (You have to dig deep to figure out what these are)
In Adding Object Behavior to Relational Data " With Zope and Aqueduct " "Aqueduct Database Methods"
In "Programming Data with Tabula"
This talks some more about Aqueduct and Tabula. Again, Tabula is defined exactly nowhere, as a matter of fact, if you search for Tabula on Zope.org all you get is a footnote on this page. http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Guides/ZSQL-HTML/ZSQL.1.5.5.html Aqueduct isn't mentioned too much on Zope.org either: just in these two places, and they don't help much... http://www.zope.org/Products/DA/ZODBCDA/CHANGES.txt http://www.zope.org/Members/paul/BusinessDecision
In "Dropin Objects" Here we see mention of the "Aqueduct line of products" ..... nuff said on this one. And Confera: this could be changed to something newer, I was under the impression that Confera was sort of obsolete.
In "High Performance" and "Multi-Platform" and "SQL and HTML in Harmony" and "Multiple Data Sources" and "Multi-tiered" and "Publish Databases" More mentions of Aqueduct.
"Multi-tiered" and "Databases" each has a figure that shows a block called Principia. Now you can find stuff about this on Zope.org, but it's scantly explained for such a key part of the system. And so on. Summary: Quickstart Really Needs to Get Updated Jeff Sasmor jeff@sasmor.com Check out http://www.naggle.com/
On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Jeff Sasmor wrote: Yep, it sure does need updating!
In App development/External Methods: "Pluggable brains" (sounds cool but daunting)
Pluggable brains are still called that, are are pretty straightforward. They're discussed in the new Zope Book, in the relational databases section, and in the (old, but IMHO still decent) ZSQL docs. They're also Quite Cool, giving a nice level of data abstraction, and a way to give ZSQL methods an 'index_html' method, so you can use a URL like http://foobar/staff/by_name/joel to get my page, rather than having to say http://foobar/staff/by_name/joel/staffInfo (assuming that staff=a folder, by_name=a ZSQL method w/direct traversal turned on, joel=primary key to look up in by_name, staffInfo=a DTML method to show a page about me)
In The Almighty Lever "An exiting new development being worked on for Zope is The Lever... "
(I have been working with Zope for well over a year and still don't know what THIS is....)
Yeeps. Never heard of it.
"Tabula or Aqueduct " (You have to dig deep to figure out what these are)
In Adding Object Behavior to Relational Data " With Zope and Aqueduct " "Aqueduct Database Methods"
Aqueduct is That Which Became ZSQL Methods (IIRC). Remember, Zope started as different products, hence the whole lingering "bobo" and "principia" names.
In "Programming Data with Tabula"
And Confera: this could be changed to something newer, I was under the impression that Confera was sort of obsolete.
I get that sense, too, though there is no death notice for it. Does Confera have any adavantage/disadvantage over the other discussion lists?
Summary: Quickstart Really Needs to Get Updated
Amen, fellow Zopista. Of course, this is an Open Source product, so I guess we could do something abou it... :-) -- Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org> Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington
On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Joel Burton wrote:
On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Jeff Sasmor wrote:
In The Almighty Lever "An exiting new development being worked on for Zope is The Lever... "
(I have been working with Zope for well over a year and still don't know what THIS is....)
Yeeps. Never heard of it.
"The Lever" is the same thing as a ZClass factory. In fact, the last chapter of the Zope book explains how you can use factories to create pre-fab templates from regular Zope objects as well as from ZClasses. That's the lever. http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/CustomZopeObjects.dtml
In "Programming Data with Tabula"
Tabula became ZTables, which is the genetic predecessor of ZCatalog.
Summary: Quickstart Really Needs to Get Updated
Quickstart Really Needs to Get Axed. -Michel
participants (3)
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Jeff Sasmor -
Joel Burton -
Michel Pelletier