[BlueBream] BlueBream TTW

Christopher Lozinski lozinski at freerecruiting.com
Sun Mar 18 14:03:23 UTC 2012


On Tuesday, February 28, 2012 12:17:12 PM Joshua Immanuel wrote:
>> Why people haven't moved from Zope 2. Even worse, they continue their
>> development towards Zope 4.
>>
First of all this is an excellent question.  Allow me to answer for
myself.  

I used to be a very aggressive Zope 2 and even Plone developer, but the
innards of Zope 2 are too messy, and worse yet in Plone,  there is just
too much junk in there.  It is clear a cleaner stack is needed.   So
BlueBream looks interesting.

So why am I still not using BlueBream, still running Zope 2 servers. 
Well for several reasons.

TTW on Zope 2 is just so easy.  I used it this week to start a new
project.  Client side stuff.  A few clicks and I was done.  No such easy
path on Bluebream.  That is why I maintain that the TTW development
tools are so needed on BlueBream.   To make it easy for people to start
using the platform.

Bluebream is hard.  I have made two major passes at it so far, and never
got it to do what I wanted to do.  It is probably the most sophisticated
application development environment I know of.  We no longer develop
applications using just a compiler and a text editor.  We sit on top of
huge libraries of object ware.  BlueBream is such a huge library.  You
have to be a really really smart software developer to understand why
you need the BlueBream architecture.  The people who are using it, are
very smart people, and they understand why they need all that stuff.  I
have so much respect for the people who wrote it.  And they figured this
all out 10 years ago. 

The next reason I have not made more progress in this direction is that
historically I have gotten a lot of flack for pushing Zope 3 TTW.  Now
the flack is way down.  Indeed the world is changed now.  BlueBream is
quite dead except for the TTW conversations, and so the time is ripe to
make this happen.   Who can object to our reinvigorating BlueBream with
TTW technologies?  It was dead anyhow.   Clearly a demo platform for ZTK
is needed!

So why did I listen to the people who discouraged me?   Well I am
sensitive.  And I was missing a key concept.  Sure BlueBream is
brilliant, but it is too complex for simple projects.  Much like Pyramid
does not publish the Zope Component Architecture, so does BlueBream need
a simpler starter model.  What I call TTW development.  Or any simpler
starter computational model would bring in large numbers of users.

Then the last few years I have been doing iPhone development. 

I am a bit surprised that the huge mass of Plone developers are not
hanging out on this email list asking for a cleaner rewrite of Plone on
top of BlueBream.  Instead they are stripping down Zope 2, getting rid
of all the stuff I like!   I cannot stay with Zope 2, I have no choice
but to do something with BlueBream. On the other hand, I know that once
we have a good TTW development environment, many of them will jump over
here very fast. 

Let me add one more point.  The nature of Open Source Software is that
people do things mostly for their own sake.   They are not paid to do it
for others.  And so while a number of people are using the ZTK
themselves, they are less motivated to make it trivial for others.  In
contrast Apple is great at making the development tools easier for
Newbies.  In XCode there are a number of template projects you can start
from.

BlueBream really needs to be a number of starter Templates.  The
existing release is for hard core ZTK developers.  That is a niche
market.  We need a BlueBream TTW development template.  We need a
BlueBream wiki template.  We need a BlueBream Content Management
template.  We need a Bluebream Yahoo Groups template.  We need a
BlueBream Social Networking template.  We need a BlueBream matchmaking
template.  We need a BlueBream Google Maps Template.  You can probably
think of a few more starter templates for BlueBream.  Since we have
literally none of those templates, even the developer one is dated. we
have a small market share.  Indeed the only recent one on the mailing
list is the ZTFY.org template, and there the docs and evaluations are
lacking.

Anyhow I am confident that BlueBream will soon be resurrected as a TTW
platform!  I really do not see any other choice for a web application
server.   Indeed the traffic on this mailing list on this topic has
picked up very nicely recently.  That is a clear indication of consumer
interest.   

Regards
Christopher Lozinski 




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