[Zope] zope rant

[Paz]

I agree. This person is misguided and either a) Does not have the skills in
Python the be able to understand properly what Zope can do and b) Have
corporate requirements that go above and beyond what he expects from a
package like Zope.

I worked for Compuware's Uniface lab for some time and can say that he
probably needs to spend the millions of USD to buy Uniface instead of
complaining about Zope. It provides the logical layers  between data and
presentation that he speaks about with the security, but were comparing
apples with elephants now. I would suggest he also be aware of Uniface's
(multi)million line-plus of coding in their kernel, as opposed to Zope that
is a small fraction of that.

I'm a newbie myself and have built my own personal website entirely with
ZSQl and DTML. As I learn Python, I go over the site and redo layers of it
to fit the proper model that Zope can provide. I see no clear proof of his
assertions against  Zope as they certainly introspect that he has not taken
the time to figure Zope out properly.

Having worked for Tech Support at the Uniface lab, I've heard it all from
customers. EVERYONE says how complex their application is... blah blah blah.
9 times out of 10, our specialists come back from the fields shaking their
heads because the customers basically got caught in a corner by covering the
exits with mountains made from mole-hills.... If your catch my drift....
Never blame the tools, screwdrivers can be useful for drilling holes, but
only when you don't have a drill.

Agreed, he has a point... I read his CV page about the MEMS exchange and
albeit, Zope is probably not suited very well to his needs, since they made
design decisions prior to Zope that greatly affect Zope's capabilities and
behavior. But, he pays a great disservice to Zope users by not explaining
this. I'm not a developer, so I'm not able to argue the tech attributes. I'm
a project manager with little enough staff that I need to jump in myself
here and there... and I love the experience of it. But the bottom line is
that most tools like Zope can be exactly what you need providing the
realization that certain steps need to be prepared first to align this
decision. It sounds to me that he didn't have this opportunity and that's
why Zope is downtrodden, but at Zope's expense, and not his own, which it
should be. Unfortunate, but most development projects will undergo this
'rebuilding requirements' phase several times before getting it right. Its
just unfortunate that he doesn't depict it as so.

Paz

-----Original Message-----
From: zope-admin@zope.org [mailto:zope-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of matt
Sent: Sunday, April 15, 2001 4:27 AM
To: Win GO; zope@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope] zope rant


Seems very misguided, and I think perhaps he is just very confused.  For one
thing putting ZClasses and Zope Products in the same category dosen't make
sense to me.  I tend to write a lot of Zope products as python modules and
with
that I get grep, I get CVS, I get test suites ... in fact there are
tutorials
around somewhere that show you how to run ZPublisher for debugging, it's an
easy step to build the test suite around that.  Next the talk about "Much of
the
application ends up as DTML" ???  that goes against most people's Zope
philosophy, where DTML is a presentation layer ..... if you are writing your
application in DTML and it works then well done!! but I wouldn't want to
debug
it.  There is also this confusion with "dynamic scope", one of the most
fantastic things about Zope is implicit acquisition.  Sure it takes a bit to
get a feeling for, but once you are there you start to organise your
hierachies
of attributes and methods into an environment that makes sense, and which is
very powerful.  If he is trying to build as they say "complicated objects",
then through-the-web DTML is not really what they should be trying to do.
Writing a python product would be the more obvious path.  And if he/she
finds
editing in a Netscape text box so horrible for dtml and PythonMethods, then
perhaps they could use their favourite editor and the nice FTP server that
Zope
comes with ... :-)

Matt