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

[Jim Fulton]

Martin Kretschmar wrote:
> 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.

Well, thanks for the kind words.  Makes me want to
work really hard to satisfy your concerns.

 > 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.

I'm sorry you feel that way.

We've tried to be very honest about the road map.
Zope 3 has taken much longer than I expected. I made
a conscious decision a few months ago to actually slow it
down, Why? Two reasons:

- We have Zope 2. While not perfect, Zope 2 is a great system.
   We make out living with Zope 2. The vast majority of ZC
   people work in Zope 2, not Zope 3.

- We want Zope 3 to be as solid and clean as it can be.
   We have an opportunity, before a stable release, to change things
   readily. That will be much harder once it's in production.


> 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,

This enormous learning curve is one of the main
reasons we created Zope 3.

 > 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.

That's both insulting and incorrect.  Many of the leaders
of the Zope 2 community are involved in Zope 3 and using it.
These people are application developers.


> 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 ...

Any new project distracts development from other projects.
That's natural and healthy? Has development on Zope 2 stopped?
No. ZC still puts more work into Zope 2 than into Zope 3.
I expect that to continue for some time.

Jim

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