[Zope-dev] Re: ZClassNG proposal makes Archetypes Easy.

[Martin Aspeli]

Christopher Lozinski wrote:
> For those who have not been following this thread, here is the
> proposal. http://wiki.zope.org/zope2/ZClassesNG

Can you please not start a new thread for every turn of this 
conversation? 8 of the last 9 threads are by you on this exact issue.

> Last night I realized that this proposal, will make it really easy
> for me to create Archetype Classes on Plone.  Suddenly Plone
> development goes from painful to fast and easy, and I can build my
> new apps on Plone reasonably quickly.   Which I need, because I am
> moving from a single person company to a multi-person company, and
> the whole approvals cycle is now becoming much more important to me.

Plone development with Archetypes is not painful. Hundreds of developers 
do it, so it can't be that bad. See

http://plone.org/documentation/manual/archetypes-developer-manual
http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/richdocument

and especially

http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/archgenxml-getting-started

The latter is about generating AT content types from UML diagrams.

> Have you seen how many lines of code it takes on the file system to
> put up a simple product with 1 instance variable?  I am just not as
> smart as others.  I make mistakes.  If I can do a simple point and 
> click to create a product, I will make fewer mistakes, and it will be
> generated faster, and I have more time for other things.   There is
> just too much software which needs to be written.

Yeah, I honestly don't find it very hard. But at the risk of repeating 
this again and again and again. Can you *please* look at Grok? Or 
ArchGenXML if you want to develop against Plone.

> Good Point.  Better only edit the code in one place or this problem
> will arise.   I will add a read me to the file system, saying DO NOT
> EDIT THIS CODE ON THE FILE SYSTEM!  And a flag, perhaps a file name,
> DO_NOT_OVERWRITE which will prevent overwrites.   Just think, this
> will be the fastest way to generate a new zope product.

If you just want something to create boilerplate filesystem code, then 
look into PasteScript and ZopeSkel. For a Plone perspective, see:

http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/use-paster

>> Also, Zope needs a restart to load a new product, which will mess
>> with the workflow.
> Great Point.  I hope this one is fixable.  I would think it should be
> possible for Zope to be able to dynamically unload a Product, or load
> or reload a product.  I wonder why it does not do so now?  Is this
> fixable?   Of course once the product is loaded, a refresh.txt option
> allows it to be changed and rewritten dynamically.

Again, I doubt people will be willing to perform risky refactoring of 
Zope internals to support your one dubious use case.

> I do agree with you on one point.  It needs a different name.  Can I
> call them LozinskiClasses?  I am surprised more people do not
> ego-name products.   Look a new word!

Yay.

Martin