[Zope-dev] Functional areas of Zope

[Laurence Rowe]

On 18 October 2010 12:51, Thomas Lotze <thomas at thomas-lotze.de> wrote:
> 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 would say that javascript and client side programming frameworks are
out of scope for Zope the project. There are plenty of existing client
side frameworks (jquery, YUI, etc.) with varying degrees of weight and
functionality. We don't want to build another.

Zope components may need to implement some rich functionality (form
widgets for instance), in which case it may be worthwhile picking a
particular javascript framework to use (Plone uses jquery).

We also want to make it easy to communicate between client side
javascript and server side python via JSON (bobo implmented some json
help classes IIRC).

Laurence