[Zope] main Zope 3 benefits

[Terry Hancock]

On Thu, 02 Feb 2006 00:14:59 +0100
Rakotomandimby Mihamina
<mihamina.rakotomandimby at etu.univ-orleans.fr> wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-02-01 at 15:21 +0000, michael nt milne wrote:
> > Is there a page anywhere which lists the main benefits
> > of Zope 3?

You can find the proposal for it starting from zope.org, I
don't know the actual URLs, but it's not hard to find by
searching.

> According to the beginer I am, the benefit is that zope2
> will disapear (as well as zope 1, for example...). That's
> a good reason to learn zope 3 as soon as possible :-)

Not so much. Zope 3 is a complete rewrite of Zope, so it's
been existing in parallel with Zope 2 for some time. The
Zope 2 branch will probably take quite awhile to die out.

And don't forget that it's still going to be around, even if
they aren't actively developing it. I still have a site
using Zope 2.5.1!

> The documentation is very slim, I agree, but why not help
> with your own little tutos? :-)

It is indeed spotty.

This cry "if the documentation is too poor, write your own"
does get kind of old, though. Obviously if you understood it
well enough to write documentation, you wouldn't be trying
to find it!

Still, Zope 3 is moving towards being better documented than
Zope 2 was.  This is mainly a matter of making it
"self-documenting."  In practice this often works better,
because the "documentation" stays up to date. A big problem
with earlier versions was documentation that was out of
synch with the releases.

The *big event* with Zope 3 is the redesign to an "interface
+ components" architecture.  This makes Zope 3 more like a
"tool box" than a "framework" which is generally regarded as
a good thing.  There is, of course, a "framework" called
"Zope 3" which is built from this "tool box", but it's much
easier to deconstruct Zope 3 and combine it with other
Python modules.

This is a really big win from the standpoint of the Python
"Zope Product" developer, who's looking to adapt a bunch of
pieces together to make a work web application. It's a less
obvious win if you just do "through the web scripting".

In the latter case, in fact, you're probably better off
(right now) sticking with the Zope 2.x series, because the
TTW interfaces for Zope 3 are still very rough (at least
this is what the reports say -- I still haven't really
tested it out).

What I have done is to browse the Zope 3 source tree, and I
have made use of the "interface" and "schema" modules. Very
nice stuff!  If the rest of Zope 3 measures up to that, then
it's going to be a joy to work with.

Cheers,
Terry

-- 
Terry Hancock (hancock at AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com