RE: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope
I agree on the 'view' concept for classes versus the traditional UML / IDE integration concepts... Implementing a ZEO client core for a front-end GUI toolkit does make more sense; it would perform better, have full access to the server, and still be relatively x-platform (Win/Unix/MacOSX). I still have some questions: - Wouldn't there be an advantage to having software products be installed on the server (instead of a really FAT client)? - By going the ZEO client route, don't you lose a lot of the things you would get with Zope like the security model? Or would this be different? - The level of complexity there to develop such a thing grows quite a bit, though, especially for those of us who remain ignorant (and perhaps a bit fearful ;) ) of what is really running underneath the hood when it comes to the ODB and ZEO... XMLRPC has both the advantage and disadvantage of simplicity, for whatever that is worth... Sean -----Original Message----- From: Michel Pelletier [mailto:michel@digicool.com] Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 3:53 PM To: sean.upton@uniontrib.com Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope On Mon, 21 May 2001 sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
4. I'm not sure I would pay for an IDE versus using traditional tools, but I WOULD PAY FOR CASE TOOL INTEGRATION. I want forward/reverse engineering from UML; this would require the ability to have the CASE tool plugin
I'm not sure how important a J-together like IDE would pay off in this respect, but I would love to see a UML-ish like visualization tool that is totally isomorphic to python. The object's under the hood are all python, the visualization is just a 'view', no need to go back and forth. Changing the code or run time object model changes the visualization immediately.
Zope, via XML-RPC, could be a very good platform for creating an extensible toolkit for desktop access to Zope, wrapping XML-RPC calls to Zope machinery to do certain tasks.
XMLRPC could do this, but I'm afraid it would be seriously limited. XMLRPC is very useful, but it does not map as well as it could onto the python object model. I would prefer to see a GUI client running in the same process space as a ZEO client, this way the GUI client could do everything that Zope could do and re-use alot of the existing interfaces (like security, acquisition, script objects, etc). The upshot of xmlrpc is that you could write front-ends in various languages and platforms.
I'm currently doing a bit of playing around with wxPython, which reminds me a lot of my days programming with the Borland OWL class libraries, so I might be partial to such a solution using wxPython instead of tkinter (tcl interpreter - blech! motif-style widgets - yuck!). An IDE built with a decent (modern) widget set / UI class library, with extended toolkit functions, like data-bound controls, might make for an interesting user-extensible means of creating custom-tweaked IDEs, not to mention other desktop software that accesses Zope...
wxPython is indeed very cool.
In addition to an IDE, I want to be able to have some good guidelines and documentation for standardized UML in Zope, so that when I share designs with colleagues, I don't have to use a ridiculous amount of my own flavor of stereotypes, just because I don't know any better. Once I have that, I want CASE->CODE->CASE tools with an existing tool (even if it is a Visio extension hacked with VBscript),
blech. it would take you just as long to hack one up with xwPython and have a real object model underneath and it would be x-platform. -Michel
1. There's a python UML project at sourceforge, which currently doesn't seem to have anything in it - but the author should be contacted re this discussion. 2. ArgoUML has open source java which takes care of all the diagram side and is designed to plug into all sorts of stuff. Uses XMI as internal model, not just for export import. There's also a Corba API in the UML standard so it should be feasible to call backwards and forwards to python via Corba (or adapt it to XPCOM). Also of course there's JPE (assuming Jython inapplicable for Zope). 3. Transwarp creates "structural models" from XMI of UML diagrams and will soon do reverse. 4. Python itself pretty much *is* a Meta-Object Protocol. ...isomorphic UML visualization of "live" Python objects is doable! -----Original Message----- From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of sean.upton@uniontrib.com Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2001 9:52 AM To: michel@digicool.com; sean.upton@uniontrib.com Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: RE: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope I agree on the 'view' concept for classes versus the traditional UML / IDE integration concepts... Implementing a ZEO client core for a front-end GUI toolkit does make more sense; it would perform better, have full access to the server, and still be relatively x-platform (Win/Unix/MacOSX). I still have some questions: - Wouldn't there be an advantage to having software products be installed on the server (instead of a really FAT client)? - By going the ZEO client route, don't you lose a lot of the things you would get with Zope like the security model? Or would this be different? - The level of complexity there to develop such a thing grows quite a bit, though, especially for those of us who remain ignorant (and perhaps a bit fearful ;) ) of what is really running underneath the hood when it comes to the ODB and ZEO... XMLRPC has both the advantage and disadvantage of simplicity, for whatever that is worth... Sean -----Original Message----- From: Michel Pelletier [mailto:michel@digicool.com] Sent: Monday, May 21, 2001 3:53 PM To: sean.upton@uniontrib.com Cc: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] Prerequisites for a desktop IDE, or any desktop app w/ Zope On Mon, 21 May 2001 sean.upton@uniontrib.com wrote:
4. I'm not sure I would pay for an IDE versus using traditional tools, but I WOULD PAY FOR CASE TOOL INTEGRATION. I want forward/reverse engineering from UML; this would require the ability to have the CASE tool plugin
I'm not sure how important a J-together like IDE would pay off in this respect, but I would love to see a UML-ish like visualization tool that is totally isomorphic to python. The object's under the hood are all python, the visualization is just a 'view', no need to go back and forth. Changing the code or run time object model changes the visualization immediately.
Zope, via XML-RPC, could be a very good platform for creating an extensible toolkit for desktop access to Zope, wrapping XML-RPC calls to Zope machinery to do certain tasks.
XMLRPC could do this, but I'm afraid it would be seriously limited. XMLRPC is very useful, but it does not map as well as it could onto the python object model. I would prefer to see a GUI client running in the same process space as a ZEO client, this way the GUI client could do everything that Zope could do and re-use alot of the existing interfaces (like security, acquisition, script objects, etc). The upshot of xmlrpc is that you could write front-ends in various languages and platforms.
I'm currently doing a bit of playing around with wxPython, which reminds me a lot of my days programming with the Borland OWL class libraries, so I might be partial to such a solution using wxPython instead of tkinter (tcl interpreter - blech! motif-style widgets - yuck!). An IDE built with a decent (modern) widget set / UI class library, with extended toolkit functions, like data-bound controls, might make for an interesting user-extensible means of creating custom-tweaked IDEs, not to mention other desktop software that accesses Zope...
wxPython is indeed very cool.
In addition to an IDE, I want to be able to have some good guidelines and documentation for standardized UML in Zope, so that when I share designs with colleagues, I don't have to use a ridiculous amount of my own flavor of stereotypes, just because I don't know any better. Once I have that, I want CASE->CODE->CASE tools with an existing tool (even if it is a Visio extension hacked with VBscript),
blech. it would take you just as long to hack one up with xwPython and have a real object model underneath and it would be x-platform. -Michel _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )
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sean.upton＠uniontrib.com