Isn't DTML more like what other frameworks do?
"""Why (the hell) are you (still) using DTML (as newbie). You are strongly encouraged to use ZPT.""" My sense is that ZPT solves a problem which for most of us does not exist. If you wish to have designers work directly on markup in an HTML WYSIWYG editor then yes, ZPT is great. But most of us create our own HTML anyway. And for us it doesn't matter if DTML works in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, because we don't use the latter. What does matter is that DTML is very similar to RHTML (as in Ruby On Rails), ASP, etc. ZPT requires a new way of thinking. I would much rather convert RHTML to or from DTML than to or from ZPT. So I don't really get the benefit of using ZPT. The fact that no one outside of Zope seems to have created a ZPT-like solution suggests to me that ZPT, as I said, solves a problem which doesn't exist.
zope-bounces@zope.org wrote on 01/08/2007 01:01:26 PM:
"""Why (the hell) are you (still) using DTML (as newbie). You are strongly encouraged to use ZPT."""
My sense is that ZPT solves a problem which for most of us does not exist. If you wish to have designers work directly on markup in an HTML WYSIWYG editor then yes, ZPT is great.
What does matter is that DTML is very similar to RHTML (as in Ruby On Rails), ASP, etc. ZPT requires a new way of thinking. I would much rather convert RHTML to or from DTML than to or from ZPT.
So I don't really get the benefit of using ZPT. The fact that no one outside of Zope seems to have created a ZPT-like solution suggests to me that ZPT, as I said, solves a problem which doesn't exist.
I initially resisted ZPT, strongly. But, the designer/developer dichotomy is not the real reason to use ZPT. The real reason is that ZPT makes it very difficult to generate ill-formed pages. A secondary reason, is that if you are doing a lot of work with forms, it is actually much easier to create a single forms that handles both initial input and correction of errors. jim penny
--On 8. Januar 2007 13:01:26 -0500 "Mark, Jonathan (Integic)" <jonathan.mark@integic-hc.com> wrote:
"""Why (the hell) are you (still) using DTML (as newbie). You are strongly encouraged to use ZPT."""
My sense is that ZPT solves a problem which for most of us does not exist. If you wish to have designers work directly on markup in an HTML WYSIWYG editor then yes, ZPT is great.
That's a pseudo argument. I've never seen any designer working on top of a ZPT
But most of us create our own HTML anyway. And for us it doesn't matter if DTML works in a WYSIWYG HTML editor, because we don't use the latter.
What does matter is that DTML is very similar to RHTML (as in Ruby On Rails), ASP, etc. ZPT requires a new way of thinking. I would much rather convert RHTML to or from DTML than to or from ZPT.
So I don't really get the benefit of using ZPT. The fact that no one outside of Zope seems to have created a ZPT-like solution suggests to me that ZPT, as I said, solves a problem which doesn't exist.
The question is: what is easier to learn and to understand - DTML or ZPT? Can you explain the "nonsense" of the _ namespace in DTML to a newbie? Can you explain the sequence-item magic with all special cases to a newbie? ZPT is another approach to generate HTML. It's more logical, easier to learn and read. A person with PHP background might prefer DTML but from my experience with people starting with I can say that ZPT is more straight forward for them. ZPT has of course it's pros and cons but my general advice to people starting with Zope: thumb up for using ZPT, thumb down for using DTML. Andreas
Andreas Jung wrote:
The question is: what is easier to learn and to understand - DTML or ZPT?
The correct answer is, of course, Twiddler ;-) http://www.simplistix.co.uk/software/python/twiddler Chris -- Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk
--On 9. Januar 2007 07:47:28 +0000 Chris Withers <chris@simplistix.co.uk> wrote:
Andreas Jung wrote:
The question is: what is easier to learn and to understand - DTML or ZPT?
The correct answer is, of course, Twiddler ;-)
Yes, you deserve the Zope Lifetime Award for Twiddler :-) Andreas
Andreas Jung wrote at 2007-1-8 19:08 +0100:
... The question is: what is easier to learn and to understand - DTML or ZPT? Can you explain the "nonsense" of the _ namespace in DTML to a newbie?
Sure. There is only one caveat: that two positional arguments need to be passed for recursive calls of DTML objects ("None" and "_").
Can you explain the sequence-item magic with all special cases to a newbie?
There is no need. Newbies do not need to know *all* special cases only the most essential ones. The myriads of TALES expression types are almost as bad the "sequence-item" special cases.
ZPT is another approach to generate HTML. It's more logical, easier to learn and read.
This is arguable... -- Dieter
I was reading a public blog post among the Zope honchos. And they were agreeing that ZPT was a mistake. Some said that Zope ought to have used something like CSilver. Jim Fulton had complained that he had just spent an entire morning setting up tests for a ZPT page, and that he, Fulton, was supposed to be good at this stuff. One good thing about Ruby on Rail's RHTML is that it clearly separates RHTML calls with side effects but no returned value ("<%") from those that return a value but have no side effects on the page ("<%="). The developer of Eiffel says that in good O-O design routines either have side effects or they return a value, but not both. As for me, I am lazy. ZPT does things in a way that few other frameworks do, although Ruby's Amrita2 sort of resembles ZPT. Displaying phantom text in a static page which will not be there dynamically is not superior to DTML. It is just more confusing. I have never learned ZPT well and I may never do so. Of course, I am not a Zope developer guy, just a user. As for _ being confusing, if I need to figure something out about the namespace variable then I look it up. -----Original Message----- From: Dieter Maurer [mailto:dieter@handshake.de] Sent: Tuesday, January 09, 2007 2:01 PM To: Andreas Jung Cc: Mark, Jonathan (Integic); zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Isn't DTML more like what other frameworks do? Andreas Jung wrote at 2007-1-8 19:08 +0100:
... The question is: what is easier to learn and to understand - DTML or ZPT? Can you explain the "nonsense" of the _ namespace in DTML to a newbie?
Sure. There is only one caveat: that two positional arguments need to be passed for recursive calls of DTML objects ("None" and "_").
Can you explain the sequence-item magic with all special cases to a newbie?
There is no need. Newbies do not need to know *all* special cases only the most essential ones. The myriads of TALES expression types are almost as bad the "sequence-item" special cases.
ZPT is another approach to generate HTML. It's more logical, easier to learn and read.
This is arguable... -- Dieter
As for me, I am lazy. ZPT does things in a way that few other frameworks do, although Ruby's Amrita2 sort of resembles ZPT. Displaying phantom text in a static page which will not be there dynamically is not superior to DTML. It is just more confusing. I have never learned ZPT well and I may never do so. There is also Twiddler from Simplistix. It is something pretty new and interesting. It claims that there is no need to learn new templating language.
I'm not using dtml, only if I have to modify existing code, but it is painful. Often I don't know what happens and where from are all these variables :) Other thing is, that AFAIR dtml is faster than ZPT. -- Maciej Wisniowski
On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 08:31:29PM +0100, Maciej Wisniowski wrote:
As for me, I am lazy. ZPT does things in a way that few other frameworks do, although Ruby's Amrita2 sort of resembles ZPT.
Not really. It's more closely related to the Meld family (pymeld, pymeldlite, meld3), and to XMLC.
Displaying phantom text in a static page which will not be there dynamically is not superior to DTML. It is just more confusing. I have never learned ZPT well and I may never do so.
There is also Twiddler from Simplistix. It is something pretty new and interesting. It claims that there is no need to learn new templating language.
Twiddler also looks very similar to the Meld family. Looks nice, but I haven't had time to get a sense of what distinguishes it from meld3.
I'm not using dtml, only if I have to modify existing code, but it is painful. Often I don't know what happens and where from are all these variables :) Other thing is, that AFAIR dtml is faster than ZPT.
My feeling about the DTML-vs-ZPT debate is that it can basically be reduced to the following chart: FEATURE | DTML | ZPT | --------------------+-----------+-------------+ potential for | | | confusion due to | Lots | A little | implicit magic? | | | --------------------+-----------+-------------| "familiar" syntax? | Yes | No | --------------------+-----------+-------------| round-trip with | Hell no | Maybe, with | an HTML designer? | | some pain | --------------------+-----------+-------------| Useful for | Yes | Not really | non-X(HT)ML? | | | --------------------+-----------+-------------| Prevents invalid | No | Yes | markup? | | | --------------------+-----------+-------------+ So, you have to ask yourself which of the above you care about for the projects you work on. With Zope, I am typically doing HTML or XML, usually with somebody else doing the design. For me, ZPT has nice advantages. OTOH, sometimes we're doing ZSQL so we use DTML syntax for that. ZPT would be useless for building SQL queries. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com
Paul Winkler wrote:
Twiddler also looks very similar to the Meld family. Looks nice, but I haven't had time to get a sense of what distinguishes it from meld3.
Thanks, it is similar to meld3 but was developed totally separately from it. I've put a lot of effort into getting the interfaces correct and providing flexible input parsing, output rendering and filtering. It's also full documented and tested. Using your chart:
FEATURE | Twiddler --------------------+--------- potential for | confusion due to | None implicit magic? --------------------+--------- "familiar" syntax? | Yes - python ;-) --------------------+--------- round-trip with | Yes an HTML designer? | --------------------+--------- Useful for | Yes - plain text parser non-X(HT)ML? | --------------------+--------- Prevents invalid | Yes - if default parser used markup? | --------------------+---------
cheers, Chris -- Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting - http://www.simplistix.co.uk
"Mark, Jonathan (Integic)" <jonathan.mark@integic-hc.com> wrote:
So I don't really get the benefit of using ZPT. The fact that no one outside of Zope seems to have created a ZPT-like solution suggests to me that ZPT, as I said, solves a problem which doesn't exist.
There are several applications outside Zope which use TAL and METAL as their templates: they didn't have to invent their own templating languages because Zope had already solved the problem for them. N.B. These are separate implementations, not just borrowing of Zope code: modpython uses SimpleTAL, roundup I believe has its own implementation of TAL. There is also an implementation called OpenTAL although it looks kind of inactive. It isn't just the Python world that uses TAL, there is also PHPTAL and there may be others that I didn't find.
Aloha, Mark, Jonathan (Integic) wrote:
What does matter is that DTML is very similar to RHTML (as in Ruby On Rails), ASP, etc. ZPT requires a new way of thinking. I would much rather convert RHTML to or from DTML than to or from ZPT.
So I don't really get the benefit of using ZPT. The fact that no one outside of Zope seems to have created a ZPT-like solution suggests to me that ZPT, as I said, solves a problem which doesn't exist.
As mentioned other frameworks use TAL/METAL (the basis for ZPT; bear in mind ZPT is a zope-specific use of TAL and METAL) - I have worked with Roundup a bit and it was a joy to see that it used TAL for template language. One major factor nobody has mentioned yet is that TAL/METAL offers much better ability to separate logic, presentation and content. By their very nature HTML-munging template markups violate this well-known (if not well-respected ;-) design principle. The WYSIWYG editor thing is merely a side benefit of markup that is both XML compliant and cleanly separates logic, presentation and content. I suspect that nobody else created TAL because it is easier to go with what one is familiar/comfortable with - HTML-munging - than to break new ground, even when the new ground is better in both design and practice. Sure DTML is more like PHP and ASP and Ruby/Rails' HTML munge and Alfresco's HTML munge and so on (whatever they're called). As my grandma used to say, if everyone were jumping off a cliff, would you do it too just because they were? ;-) cheers, John S. -- John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design ------------------------------------------ - Eco-Living - Whole Systems Design Services People - Place - Learning - Integration john@eco-living.net http://eco-living.net
participants (9)
-
Andreas Jung -
Chris Withers -
Dieter Maurer -
Duncan Booth -
John Schinnerer -
JPenny＠ykksnap-america.com -
Maciej Wisniowski -
Mark, Jonathan (Integic) -
Paul Winkler