Date: Mon, 03 Jun 2002 15:34:27 -0700 From: Dan Shafer <pydan@danshafer.com> Subject: Re: Subclassing Folder

That's what I started out to use on a couple of projects but I had several people on this list warn me that ZClasses are not very robust, are quite difficult to use and perhaps even buggy. I was warned not to use them except for fairly toy-sized apps. Was that too harsh a judgement?

Back when I was deciding what Web development platform to "bet on" for my future application work, I spent a LOT of time looking at options. I settled on Zope principally because it used Python (which I didn't yet know but which I could see from my background was going to be a very approachable and clean language to use) and because it was object-oriented and extensible using ZClasses. Zope has been very satisfying for all of the site development work I've done but I've tried three different applications, ranging from moderately complex to what seemed to me to be simple, and it has just refused to yield success. In the first case, I was able to find what I'd call a satisfactory workaround, using built-in Zope objects and muscling them around with brute force in Python scripts. But it doesn't feel very object-oriented at all and I'm not feeling like the solutions are at all elegant.

Perhaps it's just that my expectations of Zope were too grandiose. And now I've spent so much time trying to master it that I hate to start learning something else. But as helpful as this list can be, sometimes I think maybe I'm just in over my head.

...

- C

Hang in there, Dan. The best guide to creating Python Products that I have seen is in the fairly new book Zope Bible. Last time I looked, Amazon had it marked down from $50 to $35. Regarding ZClasses -- I did a moderately big project (email newsletters) in Zclasses, and now I'm rewriting it as a Product. Wish I had just done a Product from the beginning. A fairly strong case against ZClasses was made on this list last week, in the posting "ZClasses Must Die". The wonderful thing about Python Products is that they are Python. Get the Zope Bible, and it will show you all the incantations you need to wrap up your python application in the Zope persistence and web presentation machinery. -- Wade Leftwich Ithaca, NY