[Zope] general API question

[David Evans]

comment below:

On Thu, 2004-09-30 at 14:39, Dieter Maurer wrote:
> Please stay on the list... -- readded
> 
> David Evans wrote at 2004-9-29 16:07 -0400:
> > ...
> >No offense intended,
> 
> No problem, I can live with different opinions...
> 
> > ...
> >Coming from J2EE world, I am able to look as deeply as i
> >like into the classes that comprise Struts and Tomcat.
> 
> You can do that with Zope to an even greater extend: it is open source
> down to the very basics...
> 
> But nobody provided documentation for all details -- aside
> from the not too bad source documentation. And I am convinced
> that this is not bad!
> 
> You can use documentation extraction tools (like "DocFinder"
> or "epydoc") to derive most mass documentation.
> 
> Most of Java documentation you know was derived in the same way.
> But, as you do not have full source, someone else had to
> extract it for you. With Zope, you can extract it yourself.
> 
> > ...
> >It seems to me
> >that without a good understanding of the request and session objects and
> >the available methods and properties of these objects it will be
> >difficult to write complex applications that are not fragile.
> 
> I think, I already told you that the most relevant aspects
> of the request and response objects are documented in the Zope Book.

The 2.6 version of the Zope book's API reference does not list the
.form, .cookies or .other attributes of the request class. Those seem
quite relevant to me. Thats why i started this thread. And the main
point is that someone has to make the decision of what is and is not
relevent. I'd prefer to do that myself. And using standardized API docs
is much quicker than using the source code, while in the middle of
solving an application problem, i don't want to delve into the source, i
want to switch over to a browser that has the API available in a quickly
tranversable format, look at the class in question, and continue.

I will soon run docfinder and see what results it delivers, and i am
also making an effort to help with the API docs for the 2.7 version of
the zope book. 

I must say that after having looked in the source code, i now understand
that the many layers of inheritance that are going on in many of the
zope classes do make the idea of a complete reference confusing.

thanks again for your time and input.

dave