[Grok-dev] Re: Admin UI name change suggestion

[Martijn Faassen]

Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
[snip]
>> You'd get rid of the UI in favor of a /recreate view? We have a UI. It 
>> can show broken objects. It can install multiple applications. You can 
>> click to the introspector. You want to throw it out completely
> 
> No. I want to refactor it.
> 
> Your tone suggests that I'm willing to sacrifice everything we've worked 
> for on for this idea. That's not true. First of all I wouldn't suggest 
> these changes if I didn't think the outcome was worth it. And second, 
> I'm nowhere suggesting to degrade in functionality. I just want Grok to 
> make a beginner choice for you.

My apologies for my tone, it was indeed over the top.

I took from your responses that you'd like to replace the UI in the 
default configuration with things like this.

We have a big benefit of presenting the UI to the beginners right now, 
as it offers entry points to all sorts of functionality they'd otherwise 
need to read about (or ask around about). It's currently even better 
than Zope 2, as going to localhost:8080 will immediately go there.

What about a setup scenario where the application is installed by 
default, but you have to go through the UI in order to get to it? It's 
still one extra click but less confusion about installation. It might 
actually help beginners to see the application as a name in the URI: 
http://localhost:8080/myapp as opposed to http://localhost:8080, as that 
makes clear that the app object is an object like all others.

[snip]
>>  > The multiple apps use case is for us experts.
>>
>> That doesn't make any sense at all to me. You're saying people can't 
>> install multiple applications into a UI?
> 
> No they *can*. But so far I've yet to find a single person who wanted to 
> do that when they were learning Grok.

It's not an "absolute beginner" option. I'd argue it's not an "expert" 
option either. It's a normal developer option.

[snip]
>> I'm fine with supporting this scenario for deployment. I'm fine even 
>> with making it *possible* for beginners to just install the 
>> application directly. But I don't want to dump our UI, and I don't 
>> want to make installing multiple applications harder. I like there 
>> being a web-based UI for doing things; I got the impression people 
>> early on actually were won over to Zope because the ZMI was cool.
> 
> Possibly. I agree with the fact that we shouldn't make things harder. I 
> know we have a UI. We don't necessarily have to give that up.

Okay, so what about the approach I sketched out above? The default would 
be to install the application (if there is only one) automatically. 
There's still a UI though, so you'd have to click to actually view it. 
Since beginners are quite likely to want to reinstall the app, and more 
likely not to know about "inspect", it makes sense to have a UI there 
that shows immediately how to do these things.

For more advanced deployment scenarios the approach where the Zope 3 
root itself is replaced makes more sense, as you'd want to lock down 
what code is used as much as possible (no Z3 root, and definitely no UI).

Regards,

Martijn