[Zope-dev] State of ZPatterns

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:16 AM 3/11/01 +1100, Itai Tavor wrote:
>
>I'm wondering where TransWarp leaves ZPatterns users. Until a couple 
>of weeks ago ZPatterns was the best thing to happen in the Zope world 
>since, well, Zope. Now it's described as a 'hack', 

Those things aren't mutually exclusive, you know.  :)


>demoted into 
>'maintenance only' mode, and superceded by something that is 
>described as being as much better than ZPatterns as ZPatterns was 
>better than standard Zope development.

It hasn't been superceded.  TransWarp has several layers of functionality
planned; only one of those layers has been released to date.  (By the way,
I also don't recall ever saying even that TransWarp was "better" than
ZPatterns, let alone that it was some giant leap forward.  I did say that
it expanded further on the model which was the basis for ZPatterns, however.) 

As for "maintenance only", ZPatterns hasn't had any changes in months,
except for patches provided by its users.  That's largely because it hasn't
needed any.  There's not much you can *add* to ZPatterns, without a major
upheaval.  I figure, let the major upheaval be directed at making something
completely different, rather than have major reworking to make something
only marginally better.


>So what do we do now? Wrap up current ZPatterns work, writing it off 
>as a loss for future reuse? Or can we count on 'maintenance only' 
>being sufficient to support continued reused of ZPatterns efforts 
>long enough to justify the original development effort?

Someone asked a similar question of me at the conference.  I told them that
if I needed to develop a web-based application today, I would use ZPatterns
with Zope.  It works, it's stable, it gets the job done.

Also, recall that the RIPP model concept was introduced to the Zope
community last January, and it was many months before ZPatterns' first
release, then many more before it was stable enough to be ready for
production use.  Expect the same to be true of TransWarp.  The tools
released so far are rock solid, but there isn't anywhere near enough there
to compete with ZPatterns yet.