[Zope] Best practices to write business apps?

[Dylan Reinhardt]

I've written several business apps in Zope and would suggest one best 
practice right off the bat: acquire more experience with your tools.

Not to be discouraging, but you'll need more than passing familiarity with 
your development environment before you take on programming any reasonably 
important business system.  Yes, payroll software can be done in 
Zope.  Yes, it's even a good idea.  But I would encourage you not to make a 
payroll system your first major project... in *any* language or 
environment.  Particularly not if you're operating under any kind of 
deadline or expectation of useful results.

As for frameworks, Zope *is* a framework and a very powerful one at 
that.  Virtually anything Zope doesn't already do can be done with Python 
products.

Read a good book on programming with Python (O'Reilly's Learning Python 2nd 
Ed. is my recommendation).  Then read the Zope Developer's Guide 
(http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZDG) at least three times.   Develop a 
product that exposes a basic interface and can return functional 
administration screens using either ZPT or DTML.  Give yourself at least a 
month or two to do all this.

At the point where you're weighing issues more technically nuanced than 
whether DTML is evil (it isn't), I think you'll probably find a lot of help 
available for any ambitious projects you may be ready to take on.

HTH,

Dylan


At 12:50 PM 12/9/2002, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I'm back to playing with Zope, except this time I need it as a tool to 
>rewrite business apps (payroll, in this case.) I've read the New Riders 
>book along wit the online Zope Book. I understand that DTML is evil and 
>that new users should prefer ZPT.
>
>Anyway, is there a good document for newbies that come from procedural 
>languages like VB that would show them how to get up to speed? I need to 
>understand how to separate logic and presentation as cleanly as possible. 
>I'm actually still wondering which framework to use (Midgard, Enhydra, etc.)
>
>Thx
>Fred.
>
>
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