I have been playing around with Zope for the last month, and I must say, that I am amazed how easy most thing is in Zope. But I have discovered one great weakness in Zope: it's DTML language. DTML seems like a strange mixture of an easy to learn template language and an advanced programming language. I know nothing about Python, but it seems that I have to learn this in order to make even simple logic processing. In my opinion a descision has to be made whether to make dtml both a template and programming language or a pure template language (and leave the programming to Python methods). If the first is decided then an attempt must be done to cleanup dtml's syntax, it is nowhere near logical, and develop some new dtml tags like loops etc.. If the latter is decided then dtml still needs a clean up. I would prefer the first option, so that I (and all other newbies) don't need to spend a lot of time learning Python. Regards, A n d e r s G a a r s d a l H o l s t
On 11/12/99 12:48 PM, Anders Gaarsdal Holst at anders@colorweb.dk wrote:
In my opinion a descision has to be made whether to make dtml both a template and programming language or a pure template language (and leave the programming to Python methods). If the first is decided then an attempt must be done to cleanup dtml's syntax, it is nowhere near logical, and develop some new dtml tags like loops etc..
You mean somehow different than <dtml-in>? DTML is a reporting language, and so needs some minor level of programming, but you are right that it has too much stuff in it. It's not, however, as easy as it looks to fix---look at PL/SQL and the horror that it can become. Chris -- | Christopher Petrilli Python Powered Digital Creations, Inc. | petrilli@digicool.com http://www.digicool.com
Christopher Petrilli wrote:
On 11/12/99 12:48 PM, Anders Gaarsdal Holst at anders@colorweb.dk wrote:
In my opinion a descision has to be made whether to make dtml both a template and programming language or a pure template language (and leave the programming to Python methods). If the first is decided then an attempt must be done to cleanup dtml's syntax, it is nowhere near logical, and develop some new dtml tags like loops etc..
You mean somehow different than <dtml-in>? DTML is a reporting language, and so needs some minor level of programming, but you are right that it has too much stuff in it. It's not, however, as easy as it looks to fix---look at PL/SQL and the horror that it can become.
Thanks for the warning; I'll try to stay away from PL/SQL. :) I'd like to point Anders to a big discussion that's been raging on the list (and zope-dev) about just this very topic, look for 'DTML Syntax contd. + rant'. Don't let DTML scare you too much though; even simple DTML can be quite powerful already. Regards, Martijn
participants (3)
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Anders Gaarsdal Holst -
Christopher Petrilli -
Martijn Faassen