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

[Andre Meyer]

Well, Maik has more than a bad day. In fact, he is rather right about 
the points he raises!

I have been developing for Zope for about half a year now and it took 
considerable effort to get anything going. I have experience with 
filesystem-based Zope 2 products, Plone and Archteypes and a bit of Zope 
3. While Z3 looks promising it is not likely to just take over Z2. It is 
too much different. The biggest problem, however is the lack of (any 
useful) documentation and sample code. Without the help of the mailing 
lists you cannot get far with Zope.

With respect to CMS, Plone archetypes are too simplistic for complex 
data/document types and customisation takes too much effort.

Do not get me wrong! I decided to use Zope because it fits my bill and I 
am willing to invest more time in Python/Zope/Plone, because I like it a 
lot (*). But be aware of J2EE/.Net, especially after the Sun/M$ 
agreement. I have been a Java developer for years and I know that there 
are a lot of (commercial) parties to develop whatever anyone needs, if 
you pay them. The same must be true of .Net.

A good IDE for Python/Zope with support for application patterns, UML, 
etc. would be a good thing. Real application development is a serious 
business and good tools are essential, just like deadlines and 
milestones for new releases and up-to-date documentation. I am currently 
using Eclipse with PyDev, but it has a long way to go until it offers 
the wealth of support that Eclipse offers for Java. Boa Constructor is a 
good try, too.

This is meant to encourage everybody, I am an optimist ;-) Beware of the 
pragmatic commercial developers.


(*) fyi http://zope.org/Members/drapmeyer/spyse


Chris Withers wrote:

> Martin Kretschmar wrote:
>
>> Maik Jablonski of the german speaking Zope Users Group
>> DZUG issued a pretty bleak outlook for the future of
>> Zope. What are your oppinions?
>
>
> Maik's having a bad day, he'll get over it ;-)
>
> Chris
>

-- 
Dr. Andre P. Meyer                        http://home.hccnet.nl/a.meyer/
TNO FEL Command & Control and Simulation, http://www.fel.tno.nl/div2/
Delft Cooperation on Intelligent Systems, http://www.decis.nl/