[Zope] (Fwd) Zope musings

[Paul Everitt]

Tom Jenkins writes:
> Hi folks,
> We're in the process of evaluating Zope and Cold Fusion.  I'm the 
> resident Open Source advocate <g>, so I'd like to make sure that Zope 
> has all its benefits given its due.
> 
> We're, (well actually Alan is), working on a contract where 
> the client 
> requested Cold Fusion so he has some direct experience.  We installed 
> Principia back in December and actually are testing it for 
> another client, 
> but haven't spent much time with it unfortunately.
> 
> Alan has brought up some usage concerns of his and I hope someone 
> on the list could respond.  Please don't think that Alan is 
> against the 
> product; no in fact he is very interested in it but is just 
> unsure of the 
> tools available to help do good work.

Understood.  And thanks for sharing the points with the community.
 
> ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
> Date sent:      	Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:08:00 -0500
> To:             	TomJenkins@zentuit.com
> From:           	Alan Johnston <flames direct to me, please [g]>
> Subject:        	Zope musings
> 
> I don't know why I didn't think of this before.  As you can tell from
> earlier comments, I like Cold Fusion studio, the IDE which 
> allows you to
> control web page, database, query, and site management all in 
> one window.
> It is a very slick way to create web pages in general, 
> whether or not they
> include CF tags and CF queries.

Tis true.  On the other hand, only developers can use CF Studio, unless
you plan to plop down several thousand dollars, ship it to you
customers, and then train them on it.

Put another way: what if someone outside the company wanted to change a
ColdFusion page?  What would be their IDE?
 
> But there's no reason you couldn't also use CF Studio to 
> develop Zope/DTML
> pages.  You would have to save your pages on a local drive 
> and use Zope's

Don't suppose CF supports any standards, like saving to an FTP site or
publishing using HTTP PUT?  (Note that Zope's FTP support should be
solid within a month.)

> Upload feature to publish them.  But that's a fairly small price in
> inconvenience.  Anyway, the lack of a nice, user-friendly 
> interface for web
> page creation is the one klunky thing about Zope (Principia) 
> at our site.

I certainly agree.  We have spent a lot of time over the last month
thinking about an IDE.  The direction that we are going is:

o choose an IDE strategy that reinforces Open Source, rather than
attempt to annoint a proprietary tool like CF Studio

o base the IDE strategy on advanced standards (HTML4, CSS2, DOM, XML,
RDF, and WebDAV)

It appears that I'll have more to say on this in about a month.  Other
efforts, such as integrating PythonWorks from Pythonware, are feasible
as well.

> Typing angle brackets and obscure HTML tags into your browser 
> is a fun way
> to astound and impress your non-HTML-literate friends, but I 
> wouldn't have
> wanted to make a Georgetown/CASS questionnaire system that way.  And,
> again, trying to use Netscape Composer, as recommended in the 
> Principia
> docs is a sub-par solution.  So this is really the one 
> (only?) area I've
> seen so far where CF is way ahead Zope.

If someone has Linux on their desktop, how do they manage CF sites?

Let me ask a question that tries to quantify the situation.  IMO, the
current Zope IDE is pretty unproductive.  On a scale of 1 to 100, its
*productivity* level is about a 5 compared to NetObjects Fusion,
Dreamweaver, etc.  On other factors it shines -- it is based on
standards, is completely portable, source code is available, is
mind-numbingly easy to modify the IDE, etc.

Just for argument, let's say that CF Studio is a 90.  If we came out
with an improved IDE that retained the factors listed above that CF
Studio fails at, what number would it need to move up to for you to give
an unqualified "Yes!" ??
 
> So if we want to use Zope for real-world tasks, one important 
> need in the
> near term is to find a better way to do actual web page/HTML 

If *we* is your shop, how about...XEmacs?  Using ZServer to publish your
object system by HTTP, you can be *significantly* more productive:

o fantastic editor that now runs deliciously on Windows

o bulk copy from/to the local machine

o all the ediff capabilities you could dream up

o html-mode, etc.

o using W3 in XEmacs, access to things like setting properties and undo

It would still be missing a *whole* lot of things vs. CF Studio, such as
link checkers, a list of variables that can be inserted, syntax
colorization of the markup, etc.  Let's say it moved up to a 25.

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909