[Zope] Future of Zope

[Brian Lloyd]

> Is there any prospect of some form of friendlier developer 
> GUI to Zope,
> perhaps a Java client.  Features such as Syntax highlighting of DTML,
> and a better error description system, would greatly enhance 
> the ease of
> use of Zope.  Further, such a system would not need to replace the
> present HTML interface, but could be used optionally.  I may 
> be showing
> my newbieness here, but I guess a good first step might be a Java
> conduit to the Zope database - perhaps one already exists.
> 
> I am not knocking the hard work that developers have put into the
> system, however I suspect these are the questions that many 
> Zope newbies
> will be asking.  

This is something that has been rumbling since the earliest days
of Zope. On the one hand, a huge part of the Zope story is "through-
the-web". On the other, HTML (as we are all well aware) is a 
pretty restrictive user interface. Aside from the amount of time 
and effort required, I think one thing that has kept any serious 
efforts at a native or Java applet UI from happening is the fact 
that no matter what you implement or how well it is done, there 
are still going to be a significant number of people who don't 
like it and won't use it because "its not their tool". People 
understandably have differing tools preferences (emacs, dreamweaver,
the list is endless).

In light of this, we have tried to take a standards-based "maximum
interoperability" approach. Our approach to date has been to provide
support for things like FTP, WebDAV, and XML-RPC in an effort to 
work with as many standards-based clients as possible.

We are also keeping an eye on developments in the Mozilla community,
and the things they are working on look like they could be very 
promising as a foundation for eventually providing a much more 
usable and robust interface to Zope without losing the benefits 
of the through-the-web model. Such a thing would fit better with our
standards-based approach than a totally non-std java interface, and 
using XUL and some of the other Moz technologies would allow Zope to
provide a rich interface and still remain easily customizable.




Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com