[Zope-dev] Re: AW: AW: [Zope3-dev] I'd lobe to merge the zope3-dev and zope-dev lists

[Martijn Faassen]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> On Saturday 06 October 2007 13:14, Andreas Jung wrote:
>>> You are using 7 times the term "Zope2" and 9 times "Zope 3"
>>> and also "Plone 3.0" in this small text. Can you try to describe
>>> this without "2 or 3" in "Zope *"? I guess not, right?
>> s/Zope 2/Zope application server
>> s/Zope 3/Zope components
> 
> I personally feel quiet offended to see Zope 3 degraded to a set of 
> components. Zope 3 in itself is also an application server; Zope 2, on the 
> other hand, is an application.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Are you really saying Zope 2 isn't 
an application server?

>>> I really don't care about how it is called, but I'm sure we
>>> need some naming convention and since we have one, I don't see
>>> any reason to change this.
>> As said: there was a big discussion on the terms "Zope 2" and
>> "Zope 3" during the last DZUG conference. Bringing it to the point:
>> the terms "zope 2" and "zope 3" should die. There's only 'Zope'.
> 
> I have not been involved in this discussion. Having discussions like this 
> during a conference is good as a starting point, but should never be seen as 
> a canonical decision.

That's a good point. No final decisions were indeed reached.

>> Although you are a Zope component-only  developer
>> you can not ignore the dependent applications and framework.
> 
> So you are saying I have to change Zope 3's story to cope with Zope 2's 
> identity crisis? Honestly, degrading Zope 3 to a set of libraries and 
> components is marketing poisoning for people deploying pure Zope 3 
> applications.

I consider Zope 3 to have far more of an identity crisis than Zope 2 has 
currently. People know what to expect when they download and install 
Zope 2. With Zope 3, currently it's rather confused.

Anyway, you misunderstood what Andreas meant when he said Zope has an 
identity crisis. *Zope* has an identity crisis. What is Zope? Can you 
give an answer? Is it Zope 2 or Zope 3? Is it an application or a 
framework or a set of libraries? We can't even say it properly for Zope 
3: is Zope 3 a set of libraries or a framework or a web application 
server?  We have an identity crisis.

I'd say;

Zope 3 is a bunch of technologies for building (web) applications in the 
form of an integrate set of Python libraries.

There are different web application frameworks that make use of these 
Zope 3 technologies:

* Zope 2

* the Zope 3 web application server (which needs another name in my 
opinion, as it's too confusing with "Zope 3 the set of libraries")

* Grok

* potentially others

The Zope project aims to develop the underlying technologies and the web 
application servers on top of it. When you get "Zope" you get it in one 
of the above web application framework flavors.

It's hardly a perfect story. To simply matters for myself, I'm focusing 
on marketing Grok, and in strong association with this, the Zope 3 
technologies that Grok would be nothing without. The advantage of 
calling it something else than "Zope" is that you don't get caught up in 
the identity crisis so much.

Regards,

Martijn