[Grok-dev] grok 0.15 wishlist

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi there,

Here's a wishlist for Grok 0.15:

* WSGI/Paste support out of the box with dev/deployment profiles, this 
time for real. Volunteers to drive this, please!

* further factoring out of things like grokcore.viewlet, traversing 
behavior, etc, to make Grok technology more reusable in Zope 2 and Zope 
3 alike.

And whatever other people come up with!

One area I've been working on a lot recently isn't core Grok but should 
be presented as a rather "core-ish" item in our documentation once we 
feel it's ready: megrok.rdb

Another thing I've been bumping my head against repeatedly in recent 
months is resource management - making sure javascript + css resources 
get added to a web page whenever a widget or page fragment needs them. 
megrok.resourcelibrary reuses zc.resourcelibrary to do this, but there 
are various limitations I hope to lift by creating a more powerful new 
resource dependency/inclusion system for Zope 3/Grok.

Longer term wishlist items:

* lowering dependencies - Grok pulls in a lot of Zope 3 components. 
There's an effort to cut dependencies between Zope 3 packages that we 
might be able to help with. Ideally Grok will pull in only that code 
needed to run a Grok application.

* At the tail end of the DZUG meeting last week I started a "way out 
there" project to replace the rather hard to understand 
publishing/traversing machinery of Zope 3/Grok (spread through many Zope 
3 packages) with a single-package version. This might hopefully make 
things more understandable and hackable. This is of course extremely 
experimental, and risks breaking backwards compatibility (definitely 
will in some ways, in fact). But one day we'll have a Grok 2.0 after 
all! I think it's time we started reconsidering some core components of 
Zope 3 and seeing whether we can't simplify things a bit given the 
lessons we learned. We want to make the distance between the WSGI app 
layer and Grok as small as we can make it.

Regards,

Martijn