[Zope] Re: Presentations Available

[Nick Davis]

Chris
    I agree that 2+ years should have produced maturity. Zope seems to 
be a lot more stable than Plone.
    Maybe the reason people focus on your Plone talk is you touch a 
chord with people who too are wrestling with Plone.
    Probably at least once a week the thought crosses our minds of 
ditching Plone and going back down to the Zope level, with some of our 
own stuff sitting on top of CMF. But then, Plone does provide some good 
things. If only these things would work consistently and not keep 
changing. Also while performance problems have been addressed in 2.1 
there seem to still be migration problems and broken products which 
prevent people going to 2.1 yet. My colleague has spent a long time 
trying to migrate a Product he wrote, from Archetypes 1.2.5 to 1.3.4, 
due to the fact he had to hack around problems with references.
   My fear is as more features are added, what you describe as a shaky 
stack of complex fragile components will get ever more dependencies and 
therefore ever more complex and fragile.
   People often talk about the steep learning curve of Zope and Plone. 
When one is learning it, one tends to blame oneself for finding it 
difficult, and its a bad workman blames his tools. After a while though 
   the question arises of why this seems to be harder to learn than say, 
some mathematical concept commonly considered hard to get your head 
around. The answer seems to be because its Plone's complexity and 
inconsistencies we are learning. This is not good and doesn't bode well 
for increasing mind share.
   This is not actually any worse than the J2EE / Java / class explosion 
world, but isn't one of the points of open source and collaboration that 
it should be much much better?
   It is great that so many people are willing to contribute their own 
free time, effort and resources, to write code that they freely share.
It may well be that the quality of this code is miraculously good 
considering how its done by volunteers scattered geographically. That 
doesn't make the problems with Plone go away.
   It seems to me your recommendation to people to not use Plone at all, 
coming from someone who's been around in the Zope worldfor quite some 
time, is quite controversial but may in a roundabout way help if it 
forces people to make Plone more stable and mature.
   Well I guess I better don my asbestos clothing too. ;-)
Regards
Nick