[Zope-dev] ZClassNG proposal makes Archetypes Easy.

[Martin Aspeli]

Tres Seaver wrote:
> 
> AT has the classic "Z-shaped curve" in spades:  when it does what you
> want, it is great, but trying to get it to do something else is painful
> and frustrating.
> 
> I don't agree all that often with Chris W, but I find Archetypes an
> extremely frustrating framework to work with, an normally avoid it even
> when building out sites with it.
> 

Out of curiosity, what types of things are you trying to do that you find
frustrating?



> It is not exactly a secret that the Archetypes codebase is a mess;  its
> original authors have abandoned it, pretty much.  There are some hardy
> souls who will fix bugs in AT, but nobody has stepped up to the problem
> of making it play nice with other frameworks, or making it more
> maintainable.
> 

Archetypes has actually received more love (where "love" typically means
making it use things like Zope 3 style vocabularies and subscription
adapters for validation) over the Plone 3 release than in a long time. There
are various developers in the Plone community who are capable of maintaining
it, myself included, and we have a new overall maintainer in Daniel Nouri.



>  Trying to find a more palatable replacement for AT is a
> perfectly reasonable goal.
> 

Definitely. The longer term roadmap for Archetypes mirrors that of Zope
itself. Refactor the internals (e.g. transformation engine, reference engine
- both of which are ongoing and will probably land in Plone 3.5; starting to
use Zope 3 style widgets internally is another favourite pet peeve of mine)
to rely on more general components which do not make assumptions about
content objects being AT objects. The part of Archetypes that most people
see (the schema, the base classes) are actually fairly agnostic and could be
viewed as just another spelling of something like a Zope 3 schema + a
formlib form.

The challenge is that 90% of add-on Plone products probably rely on
Archetypes. We're not about to break them. :) That's a testament to AT's
success, and we see lots of developers who don't have a very deep grasp on
the full Zope stack being very productive with Plone+Archetypes. Sometimes,
like you say, they try to use it for things that it's not so well suited
for, and for sure it can be difficult to migrate to layers lower down the
stack in that case. That's all part of the volution, though - there's a lot
of "history" in the AT codebase. :)

Cheers,
Martin
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