[Zope] Re: [Zope-Annce] ANN: Perl For Zope

[Martijn Faassen]

Jimmie Houchin wrote:
> I would like to echo what Dieter wrote here.
> 
> We need to encourage people who write products or other extensions to
> Zope in writing cleanly, clearly defined extensions which can be used in
> a black box manner.

Sure, but we also need to encourage people to study each other's products,
and debug them, and implement patches. Open source development and all.

> If each product had a management interface in which it's options could
> be configured and it had a clear api. We could treat these as black
> boxes regardless of implementation language.

So we need interfaces, and a more componentized architecture.

I personally don't _want_ black box products. One one side, most products
should work as if they're black boxes. Clear API, managable through the
web, and so on. On the other side however, in practice I'll want to
take a look at the product source once in a while, to fix something, or
to find out how it's working.

The addition of the Perl stuff will be bad if the Zope source will be
hacked up in various places in order to support this. I can be _good_ if
this means a focus on providing clean interfaces first, and a more
componentized architecture. I.e. there's a focus on integration with
*any* external language through some generalized API. Not just Perl 
specific changes.

Regards,

Martijn