[Grok-dev] megrok.rdb

[Paul Sephton]

Hi, Chris,

I have to say that I share your concern about the maintenance of the Zope
Toolkit, but with one caviat- the ZTK is still reasonably actively used by
Pyramid as a foundation.

There certainly is little or no excitement among Python devs that I can
discern for web development in general, outside of the relatively few folks
in the Django camp.  And frankly, I have great trouble working up any sort
of enthusiasm for Django myself.  Having tasted the component oriented
approach to web development, I find anything else poor faire.

The problem is that Grok is confusing, especially to newcomers.  Morepath
does *not *do a significantly better job of selling itself than Grok did to
start with, I'm sad to say.  PHP devs take one look at it and say
"whut???".  For better or for worse, PHP is still the most prevalent
(easily the most hated) web dev tool, and even though I think server side
Javascript is a ghastly concept, it seems to have taken off with a wild
abandon I could only have hoped to see in the Python world.

Ask any two arbitrary Python devs what Grok is though, and you have around
a 1% chance of either of them knowning what you're talking about.  Assuming
you hit a jackpot with the vanishingly fading chance that both have heard
of it, their answers will be wildly varying:  For example, you and I have
completely different approaches to using Grok.

The above being the case, I don't blame you for getting that "nagging
feeling".  However, I don't think it's fair to assume that the ZTK activity
is dead just because we're not in the same room as the ZTK devs:  a quick
look at ZopeFoundation projects on github show as of this time, ZConfig &
z3c.coverage updated 17 hours ago, zope.container, persistent &
Products.LongRequestLogger updated 21 hours ago, and zc.FileStorage updated
a day ago.  That's quite a bit of activity in my book!

...and Grok is just a relatively thin layer over ZTK.

Even Zope2 updated only 12 days ago.

In my opinion, it's sad that Grok is associated closely with Plone, and
that the only time it gets head room is in the context of Plone
development.  Plone has huge competition in a shrinking space in the real
world, and I cannot see it lasting for ever.

>From my experience, Grok is a big boy able to stand on it's own two feet
without needing Plone as a crutch.   I have built some pretty enormous
systems based on ZTK technology, using little more than Eclipse, PyDev &
Postgres, and the only reason I can maintain it all on my own is because of
the component based approach to scaling the system.

Very nice to hear from you again, and cheers!


On Thu, Mar 9, 2017 at 10:22 AM, Christopher Lozinski <
lozinski at freerecruiting.com> wrote:

>  Great to hear from you.
>
> One of my biggest worries is that this whole stack of software is not
> actively used nor maintained.
>
> I am perfectly happy with what I am using, but a little voice in the back
> of my head is worried.
>
> They PyCon web conference in Berlin is coming up .  Call for papers
> deadline in March 15th.  I am tempted to submit something, but sadly there
> is no business model behind anything.
>
> In the meantime ioscompanies.info is doing great.
>
> I hope that all is well with you.
>
> Warm Regards
> Chris
>
>
>
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