[Zope] Re: Lotus Notes-like functionality/product in Zope

[Tres Seaver]

Cameron McCloud wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm a big fan of Lotus Notes - we use it in our company (a development
> shop) for various tracking type of databases (bugs, issues, change
> control, feature requests...). Notes is quite easy to use and it is
> easy to design forms and views.
> 
> I also like Zope and Plone. While Notes is good for very structured
> information, it isn't great for developing portal type applications.
> Ideally I'd like to have the best of both worlds - structured forms
> and views that are easy to construct yet integrated into the Zope
> environment with all the things that Zope is good for.
> 
> Has anyone has tried to write a very simple Notes-like product for
> Zope? Is there anything out there similar? I was thinking about this
> yesterday and it shouldn't be difficult to design a simple forms
> editor/viewer and a "view" designer. Can anyone point me in the right
> direction for going about this?

Plone's Archetypes product does code generation based on user-defined 
schemas.  Nuxeo's CPS has several components (notably CPSSchemas) which 
fill pretty much the same need, but using a different strategy (schemas 
stored in the ZODB).  Formulator is a straight Zope product which uses a 
similar strategy to CPSSchemas (it pioneered the idea, in fact). 
Infrae's Silva is more XML-centric than the others, if "structured" maps 
better for you onto XML than onto "field definitions".

Tres.
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Tres Seaver                                tseaver at zope.com
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