[Zope] Zope reference documentation?

[Paul Winkler]

I'm CC'ing Chris McDonough because I don't know who's handling
the API section for the 2.6 zope book and there is, I think,
a valid point here that relates to that appendix.

On Wed, Jan 15, 2003 at 03:27:37PM -0500, Patrick Price wrote:
> Is there a book or a place where I can find:
> 
> a: a DTML programmer's reference, or an API reference, or a TAL 
> reference which contains ALL the objects and methods available to any of 
> these scripting languages?  The Zope Book doesn't have such a reference. 
> What it has is very limited and not for a beginner.

First of all, you should know that the ZB changes often;
the 2.6 version ("in progress") adds A LOT of stuff.  
Including reference sections on ZPT etc.
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook/


> For instance, let's say I want to learn about something really basic, 
> like what REQUEST.get does.   I've searched the Zope 2nd edition book 
> (searched the most likely 4 chapters where I thought I could find this 
> information) and found nothing.

REQUEST has all the methods that python dictionaries have, including "get".

IMO this should be somewhere in the API reference, and it is not.
All it says is "The request object is a mapping object that 
represents a collection of variable to value mappings."  
An experienced python programmer *might* recognize the word "mapping"
and guess that REQUEST supports all the Python dictionary methods,
which it does.  But this is not explicitly stated.

> I've searched Google on how to use 
> "REQUEST.get" - nothing again that looks like a reference.

Now that you know that it supports all the methods of dictionaries,
you can look up dictionaries in any python reference. :)

> paragraph, and it is missing a comprehensive object.method reference 
> with syntax and examples.

There are more examples in the reference sections of the 2.6 book.
You are not the first person to ask for them. :)

> How people have learned Zope thus far with the documentation available 
> is beyond me. 

Trial, error, and mailing lists. :-\

Re. learning zope without learning python:
You already ARE using python if you're looking up stuff in the
API reference.

Zope 2 tried to make it possible to develop websites without
learning python.  IMO this failed, because the result is that
people inevitably end up with snippets of python in their DTML
without realizing that's what they're doing.

Zope 3 is planning some interesting approaches to this problem.
It's designed so that many things can be done with configuration
instead of scripting, and a very interesting replacement for
ZClasses will provide a (hopefully) very smooth and easy transition
from through-the-web developement to pure python code, and
you can get work done with any mixture of the two.
Currently under discussion on zope3-dev. But don't hold your
breath - I wouldn't expect to see a production-quality zope3
for many months. 

For now: don't fear python, embrace it. It's one of the best
things about zope 2. 

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's GHOST - SHIT CORPSE!
(courtesy of isometric.spaceninja.com)