[Zope-dev] RE: Barriers to Zope popularity: Part 2: source control

[Jay, Dylan]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kenichi Sato
> Sent: Monday, 24 September 2001 5:49 PM
> To: djay
> Subject: Barriers to Zope popularity: Part 2: source control
> 
> 
> Dear Mr. Jay, Dylan,
> 
> I am Ken Sato, a manager of software development projects. I'm now
> taking a look at Zope as a tool to publish project related
> information internally.
> 
> Zope looks nice but I found it has two potential problems.
> 
>  1. WYSIWYG editing
>  2. Source control (by ClearCase)
> 
> Then, I found that you pointed out exactly same things in the
> zope-dev mailing list.
> (http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-September/001602.html)
> 
> Because the post was two years ago, I wonder if you have already
> solved the above problems. It would be very helpful for me if you
> could give me some information on this issue, please.

Hope you don't mind me CC'ing this to zope-dev. I still see both these
issues as important and still see the lack of progress towards Zope working
well in traditional development environments being a real outage. Plus
others may have different opinions about the current state of affairs

1. I have not used Zope Page Templates but these are supposed to solve the
wysiwyg problem. They are an alternative to DMTLDocuments. They allow for
much better seperation of code and presentation. Get you graphics people to
use webdav to edit the html with whatever editor they want and the coding
people argment the html rather than rip it appart.
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles/ZPT1

Personally I like DTML and back then I did suggest a way DTML could used in
a similar way to Page Templates (basically have a view mode of a DTML
document that incorparates the rendered content as well as the DTML code
such that when the page is edited and saved back, it will save all the
changed parts back to the where they came from, i.e. the different
DTMLMethods that made up the page). but like most of my ideas I din't have
the ability or time to implement it.


2. Hasn't really been solved. There are sort of attempts that work now with
CVS (I havn't tried it)
http://www.zope.org/Members/sspickle/ZCVSMixin
This 

but there are proposals that will better solve this problem, but no
implementation on the way that I can see.
The problem is really one of synchronization. You want two different
representations that are both kept upto date. One for zope to use, one for
all the reasons we have things under source control. You may or may not want
control of when the synchronization occurs.

Here are some related proposals

http://www.zope.org//Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SynchronizationMechanismZCVSMix
in

http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SynchronizationTab

http://www.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/RepresentingObjectsOnTheFilesyst
em

I also see a lot of parallels with the work going on with ZODB replication.
If you had replication between a normal ZODB and some filesystem source
control ZODB then you would have the source control synchronization problem
solved maybe?

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZEOReplicatedStorage/FrontPage