[Zope] Re: [Zope-Annce] ANN: Perl For Zope - why I'm bummed

Kevin Dangoor kid@kendermedia.com
Thu, 25 May 2000 15:17:47 -0400


----- Original Message -----
From: "Roman Milner" <rmilner@point-one.net>
To: <zope@zope.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 25, 2000 1:48 PM
Subject: [Zope] Re: [Zope-Annce] ANN: Perl For Zope - why I'm bummed


> Here is why I'm bummed about this.  Like other people who have posted
> - after years of coding perl for money, I have vowed never to do it
> again.  (I find that it produces encourages unmaintainable code.)
> Also, I think my main marketable skill now is Zope.  So, were I to
> want to find a different job now coding Zope - perl will be expected
> to be in my skill set.  Other companies using zope will almost
> certainly have perl methods laying around that need to be maintained.
> So, basically, in order to find a job using zope - I'll have to
> relearn, and code in perl at that job.
>
> So, I believe this is enough reason for me to start considering other
> web technologies for me, and my company.

I think Zope offers a ton of features that I wouldn't want to give up. (And
I've been watching what the other servers out there are doing, and I still
appreciate the power given by Zope.)

It's a fact of web programming that there are lots of tools written in
different languages. CORBA, XML-RPC and SOAP all provide glue between
languages today. It's certainly possible you could come across someone who
has applications written in several different languages that use one or more
of these technologies to talk to each other... Adding PerlMethods just adds
another interface... one that can potentially expand the Zope user base
quite dramatically. Not to mention the possibility of tying in to some of
the vast amounts Perl code that already exists out there.

I haven't heard of anyone standing up and saying "I'm not going to use
Linux, because people might write tools in perl [or awk, or C, or lisp, or
sh, or yacc or postscript, or ...]" Perhaps that's a better way to look at
Zope... not as a python web application, but as a high-level OS extension
for dynamic web applications.

Kevin