[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?

[Andreas Jung]

Some remarks from my side as a Zope2 core developer on this issue:

The Z2 community and development is currently at a bad point:

 - very few people are contributing to the Z2 in terms of new code and bug 
fixes
    (see the tons of open bugs in the collector)

 - very few people are willing to contribute to documentation

The reasons for this situation from my prospective:

 - Lots of Z2 people are working now  on Plone projects. Plone currently 
attracts more people
    because the important and interesting projects are done there. Paul 
Everits goal to grow
    Zope by 10 times might happen through Plone, not through Zope itself

 - The Z2 development is badly managed. The 2.7 release has been delayed 
for one year or so.


 - ZC is currently the bottleneck for Z2. Several  important people have 
left  and I don't see any
   new blood there. I see that ZC is focusing on Z3 for the future. That is 
a legitimate goal from
   their own prospective but it does not reflect the needs of lots of 
users. Speaking for the company
  I am mainly working for have invest a lot time, code and money into Z2 
development. E.g. our
  complete company-critical CMS is currently being rewritten on the base of 
Zope2. Several
  other products will be also Zope 2 based. Zope 3 is in the current stage 
not really an alternative
  for complex sites, portals and applications in the style we are working 
on. Z3 might become
  interesting if we have Plone-like functionality available.  To speak with 
Maiks words: Z3 is
  attractive as an academic project to try out things and concepts but it 
does not attract people
  in the current stage...maybe in two years from now but currently most 
people are attracted
  by working and usable solutions like Plone.

 - The zope.org community site is a mess. Lots of outstanding problems are 
not fixed, the performance
    of the site is more than poor (it takes ages to login, it takes ages to 
load pages),
    usability (e.g. when you perform a software release) is bad.


We need for Zope2

  - a better and open management for Z2 releases: If ZC can not provide the 
resources in terms
     of time and manpower, the coordination and release management should 
be given
     to the community. I am sure that more are willing to contribute more 
than at the moment.
     Several companies maintain their own Zope version with lots of 
extensions and it would be fine
     to see this stuff in a common repository.

 - a clear statement from ZC to the future of Zope 2. Zope 2.8 and Zope 2.9 
are considered
    as a migration path for Zope 3 where the Z2 support should be dropped 
after these releases
    (as far as I can remember the vision of Rob a while ago). Who will 
manage Z2 releases after
    dropping the Z2 support? The last solution would be a Z2 code fork if 
we can not come to common
    agreement on the Z2 future but a code fork  would be really the last 
and absolutely worst solution
    for everyone.

 - Fix the most outstanding critical bugs on zope.org and speed it up. 
Zope.org is currently a very
    bad figurehead for Zope. If ZC can not solve the problems....either 
give the responsibility to other
    people or just close zope.org.

>From my own prospective as developer I would like to see that Z2
development over the next
two or three years continues because there is too much Z2 legacy code in 
the world and not
everyone is interested in following the migration path for Z3. To be honest 
I doubt that large
custom applications can be migrated with a justifiable amount of time and 
money (just because
they are completely bound to Z2 components and its architecture).

To clarify my standpoint: I am not an opponent of Zope3 but Zope 3 does not 
convince me
in the current stage and gives me little attraction for the projects I am 
working on....it just can
not compete with Zope 2 if you are building large-scale systems at this 
time.


Andreas

-----
ZOPYX - Software Development & Consulting Andreas Jung
www.zopyx.com

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Andreas Jung
--------------------------------
www.zopyx.com Software-Entwicklung und Consulting Andreas Jung