[Zope-dev] Functional areas of Zope

[Thomas Lotze]

Hi all,

at the Zope summit in September, we were talking about what Zope
actually is or should be and how to define the goal of the Zope
project. This led to the idea of identifying the functional areas
of Zope. I'd like to pursue this by starting a discussion about
Zope's functional areas among the developer community and hope to
come up with a number of commonly agreed-upon items. Wherever it
matters, I suggest limiting ourselves to discussing the ZTK in
order to keep things focussed.

As functional areas (for some examples, see below), we consider
diverse, broadly defined tasks and problems that a web developer
is being faced with, and that a web framework ought to have an
answer for. We hope to be able to define better what Zope is and
is not and how it compares to other web frameworks by starting
from a set of functional areas and trying to state Zope's answer
to each of them.

Another benefit from having a grip on functional areas of Zope
the project would be the possibility to organise the large and
grown set of individual packages that make up Zope's code.

To get the discussion started, I'll give a few random examples of
functional areas that we thought of immediately:

- software architecture (interfaces, components)
- data persistence (ZODB)
- URL resolution (object traversal)
- form generation (form libs for HTML forms, other possibilities?)
- resource handling (CSS, Javascript delivery)
- client-side programming framework (no good solution so far, people use
  all sorts of Javascript technologies and programming styles)

I hope for the discussion to produce a list of functional areas
that most developers agree upon, maybe further areas that need more
consideration, and possibly even some clues about Zope's answers to the
challenges of each functional area.

Thank you very much for your participation.

-- 
Thomas