[Zope] Feature requests and questions

[Michael Bernstein]

Paul Everitt wrote:
> 
> My belated two cents...
>
> If we don't do JavaScript, we should at least do PythonScript on the
> server, where PythonScript is some mythical subset of the language that
> is considered "safe".  DTML was never intended to scale up to, say,
> writing functions.  But it is becoming increasingly clear to me that we
> need more powerful programming constructs that are actually stored in
> the database.

Yes! the biggest hurdle I've been facing is the fact that to accomplish
anything interesting I need to learn _two_ new languages simultaneously.
If DTML were deprecated and replaced with a subset of Python, it would
make learning Zope much easier.

One point though: Python is a scripting language, and DTML is a tagging
language; Tagging languages 'fit' better into the structure of an HTML
page (one of the things that had atracted me to ColdFusion, for
example). Presentation is best expressed with a tagging language,
procedural logic is best expressed using a scripting language. So we may
need to keep some kind of truncated DTML for expressing conditional
presentation, while migrating a lot of functionality to a more robust
Python subset for scripting purposes, incidentally enforcing a more
strict division between presentation and logic.

Just my $0.02,

Michael Bernstein