[Zope-dev] How long below the radar?

[Alastair Burt]

This isn't a message to say to that anybody should be coding this or that
but a request for someone with a better view of the big picture to clue me
in.  

Martijn Faassen <faassen@vet.uu.nl> writes:

> Another thing I'm getting back involved in now is the whole Zope
> XML picture. I think good support for things such as XSLT, XPath,
> XLink and so on could add a lot of value for lots of people, and
> would do wonders for the enterprise buzzwordability of Zope, as well. 

I remember reading artcles from Tim O'Reilly saying that Zope was the great
open source hope for building "web services".  Out there in buzzword land,
web services means ebXML, BizTalk, and .Net.  But I do not see any mailing
list discussions or articles explaining how Zope would fit into these
frameworks. Is this because:

  1. Zope folk are astute enough to realise that all these frameworks will
     not come to anything anyway.

  2. Most of the people involved with Zope are building intranets / content
     managemnet systems / general web sites with it.  If someone comes to
     them with a big contract to develop within .Net or ebXML, they will
     start thinking about it.

  3. Zope does not have much to offer.  These systems are going to built
     with vast libraries of Java / C# code in big enterprises which have
     traditionally not shown much interest in Zope. In short, Zope does not
     really fit in.

I cannot believe that the reason there is no discussion is that the Zope
architecture is not suited to these frameworks.  If the XML / SOAP side of
things were more polished, it would form the perfect platform for
developing such services.

Seeking enlightenment,

  Alastair