[Zope-dev] The bleak Future of Zope?!

Martin Kretschmar kretschmar at infoman.de
Wed Apr 21 03:58:17 EDT 2004


Hello,

Maik Jablonski of the german speaking Zope Users Group
DZUG issued a pretty bleak outlook for the future of
Zope. What are your oppinions?

Here comes the translation of his oppoion:

> Maik, what makes you look full of scepticism for
> the future of Zope?

Shortly said, the whole set of stupidities in
connection with Zope3. It is a pretty bad state
for a project, if it looms for years as the
followup project on the horizon but in reality
isn't one! I can't believe the fairy tales with
the possible migration from Zope2 to Zope3.

All the people which have dwelled more or less
deeply into the Zope2 world, thereby having had
an enormous learning curve and now running
applications, will not be able to participate
easily on the academic Zope3 train. The technic
freaks who modell Zope3 are usually not application
developers, which have to build and run working
applications for real human users. The artifical
not-yet-product Zope3 will sooner or later be
distracting development efforts from Zope2 because
Zope3 is "almost finished." That doesn't look not
nice ...

Further I see the problem that Zope probably has
no real target group as an application server.
The enterprise world is dominated by .Net and
J2EE. Zope in its current form without a sensible
documentation in conjunction with the drama about
the english zope book doesn't help changing this.
Scripting has arrived in the Java world by Groovy,
so this isn't a reason for using Zope anymore. In
the world of small and medium applications PHP is
likely to stay, because it leads much faster to
results. Zope is to complicated for this.

For the CMS stuff we have Plone, but this is rather
suited for handling some simplistic documents for the
intranet rather then a nice internet representation.
This is because customizing Plone isn't trivial at
all and nobody want's to run web pages with standard
underwear blue. OK, the colours can be changed easily,
other features via CSS, etc. ... 

Maybe I'm simply sick of moving along within web
browsers and the file system without a sensible IDE
and documentation.

Regards, Maik




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