[Zope] Re: Presentations Available

[Chris Withers]

Hi Nick,

Nick Davis wrote:
>    I agree that 2+ years should have produced maturity. Zope seems to be 
> a lot more stable than Plone.

Well, Zope has had about 10 years to stabilise, versus Plone's 2 ;-)

>    Maybe the reason people focus on your Plone talk is you touch a chord 
> with people who too are wrestling with Plone.

*grinz* I can but hope...

>    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. 

Yep, that's a point I made while giving that talk :-S

> If only these things would work consistently and not keep 
> changing. 

You REALLY want them to stay as bad as they were? ;-)

> Also while performance problems have been addressed in 2.1 

No they haven't...

> there seem to still be migration problems and broken products which 
> prevent people going to 2.1 yet. 

Yup.

> 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.

Archetypes is the chief sinner in all of this, I'm afraid. It's trying 
to solve a very difficult problem, and one which needs tackling with 
structure and upfront and intuitive design rather than the organic 
tacking on of new "bitz" whenever anyone felt like it that AT has 
suffered through...

>   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.

Yup.

>   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.

Indeed.

>   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?

Well, that's a different discussion, and one best had over much beer...

>   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.

...but, and this may seem harsh, but that doesn't, in itself, mean 
they're any good at writing quality software...

>   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.

Moi? Controlversial? i'd never do such a thing ;-)

*grinz*

Chris

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Simplistix - Content Management, Zope & Python Consulting
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