[Grok-dev] goals related to my PyCon Grok talk

[Brandon Craig Rhodes]

My Grok talk has been accepted for the upcoming PyCon, and it looks
like it's the only Grok talk that made it - the reviewers seemed to
particularly like that it's about a general programming problem,
"adaptation", not just about Views and the Web.  It's proposal #77:

   http://us.pycon.org/2008/conference/talks/

In terms of the larger "Zope is an application framework" vs "Zope
builds web apps" identity crisis, I suppose this talk will place me
solidly in the public's mind as proclaiming "Grok lets you use Zope-
the-application-framework without having to use ZCML! Yay!", rather
than "Grok, more specifically, lets you build web applications! Yay!"

As a result of the talk's acceptance, I have the following goals that
I'd like to tackle, hopefully over the rest of this month and January:

 - I want people to be able to use Grok-the-component-registrar
   without the side effect of slowly importing dozens of Zope web
   modules.  This means, if I understand what PvW has been saying,
   that we need to move forward with moving the component-registration
   pieces of Grok out into a separate module, "grokcore", from which
   they can be imported with minimal dependencies (maybe just
   zope.interface and zope.component?).  Philip, let me know if I've
   understood this correctly, and if I have, then let me know anything
   I can do to help "grokcore" along!

 - I want Grok and Zope to start much more quickly; a several-second
   startup time really hampers, say, a command-line tool in which you
   just happen to want to use an adapter (as I myself am finding with
   a command-line tool I wrote last week).  Getting more speed may be
   impossible, but I'll be profiling just in case to see if anything
   can be done to improve things.  (I might look at the recent work in
   speeding up the Plone 3 startup code, to see if any of the issues
   are similar.)

If any of you are already working on either of these things, please
reply so that I can join in on the work.  For my part, I'll try to use
this list to keep everyone updated with how I progress as I begin to
explore them myself.  Thanks!

-- 
Brandon Craig Rhodes   brandon at rhodesmill.org   http://rhodesmill.org/brandon