[Grok-dev] Re: an 'about grok' document

[Kevin Teague]

I've updated my local copy of the static site so that it has an About  
tab with the about_grok.txt. I can upload as needed.

I think Philipp's additions are good. I was also going to suggest  
doing About/Perspective introductions for different target audiences,  
but Behrang beat me to it :)

Since I'm coming from a Zope 2 / Plone perspective, I thought I'd  
take a crack at writing a section for that audience:


Grok from the Zope 2 / Plone perspective
-------------------------------------------------------

Grok provides a pure, clean development experience of working with
the Zope 3 APIs without all of the legacy concerns of using Zope 3
style development from within Zope 2. Gone are the headaches of
acquisition, excessive multiple inheritance and layers of legacy
abstractions and crusty API calls of Zope 2. The familiar hallmarks of
Zope 2 development are still there though - painless persistence  
using the
ZODB, and XHTML templating with TAL.

Through Five, Zope 3 techniques are now available within Zope 2.
Notable projects such as Plone are taking advantage of these development
methodologies. The Zope 3 Component Architecture, with it's concepts
of interfaces, schemas, adapters and implementations makes for a robust
development environment whose loosely coupled nature excels at
customization and extension.

Learning Zope 3 concepts can be tricky. These concepts are sometimes
made harder to learn from within the familiar environment of Zope 2 -
you need to keep in mind all of the nuances of Zope 2 development,
while attempting to learn about Zope 3 development, and at the same
time trying to figure out how these two APIs fit together. On top of  
all this,
there is the added hassle of having to learn and write ZCML.

Grok provides an easy, fun way to get into Zope 3 development. It allows
pure Zope 3 development without the distractions of integrating with  
Zope 2.
You can start out in the world of Zope 3 by first building simple,  
functional
web applications using only a basic set of components, such as Views and
Models. Only latter on, after the basics have become familiar, is it  
necessary
to learn about more advanced concepts such as Interfaces, Adapters and
Subscribers.

Even if you only build simple test applications with Grok, the  
lessons learned
from this framework will ground you in a basic understanding of how  
Zope 3
components work and enrich your development experience when
encountering and using these techniques from within the world of Zope 2.