[Zope] Stand-alone dedicated client for Windows?

[sean.upton@uniontrib.com]

A few random thoughts...

Potentially, Zope has a lot to offer for building fat-client frameworks, but
not a lot of support for a fat client MI.  Personally, I think Zope as a
front-end to ZODB has good potential in a data-center environment serving
GUI clients in the web-services future, and that with this in mind,
development frameworks ought to exist to make this as easy as possible to
jump into (one can hope; perhaps someday when I get some time, I will try to
implement something like this).

I think part of the problem is that Zope really ends up being a toolkit for
most folks - and one used in a variety of different ways - and a GUI toolkit
would place restrictions on this and require a lot of work to address
working with each and every Zope product.  I think the solution for GUIs is
really a responsibility/option for the application layer (i.e. Each Zope
product), though there could be a set of tools created for generic Zope
tasks for developers (only as an IDE); I think Boa Constructor is the most
likely candidate for that.  If you want higher-level stuff, you really need
to code a custom GUI fro your product, or look into using the CMF with
document editing software that supports FTP and/or WebDAV; what is most
needed in this regard is not a one-size-fits all client, but a bunch of
documentation and examples to make it easier to do this on your own.
Developing custom GUI applications with Zope using Boa Constructor,
wxPython, and XML-RPC could have very interesting possibilities, and perhaps
what is needed is drag-and-drop components for doing this in Boa-Constructor
that allow data-binding to XML-RPC calls, like the way Borland RAD tools
bind RDB datasets to visual components...

Python 2.2 will include XML-RPC support (but you would have to extend it
with http basic-auth support), so Python 2.2 packaged together with wxPython
for Windows in a unified installer would be a nice start for deploying an
application using that as a framework; as for me, I just apt-get install,
but it would be nice to be able to build GUI apps that could be deployed by
having an installation program spawned to install all the prerequisites.

Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Frederic Faure [mailto:ffaure@bigfoot.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2001 1:00 PM
To: zope@zope.org
Subject: [Zope] Stand-alone dedicated client for Windows?


Hello,

I browsed through the archives of this list, but it didn't return any hits. 
I understand two projects are under way called Zope Fat Client and gnope 
(GNOME Zope client), and I tried Amos Latteier's example Python client last 
night, which doesn't work: "TypeError: wxWindow_GetParent() takes exactly 1 
argument (2 given)"). Besides, it'd be hell deploying Python + wxPython + a 
Python-based Zope client.

After going through tutorials of Frontier/Radio and The Zope Book, it looks 
like Zope is the open-source alternative to Frontier. Problem is, I think 
non-techies would work with a Zope-based intranet a lot more if there were 
a dedicated client for Windows instead of having to use HTML forms. Is 
there such a thing available?

Also, what are alternative DBMS-based content managements systems that I 
should know about?

Thx
FF.



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