[Zope] Zope Alternative

[Paul Winkler]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 07:35:48AM -0800, Hafeliel wrote:
> My thanks to everyone who took the time to reply.
> 
> Here's what I'm hearing:
> 
> [1] Many of you agree that the Zope Book is woefully
> incomplete.  Paul, for example, was kind enough to
> point out that the Image class is a descendent of the
> Persistent class.
> 
> I opened my Zope Book back up to see how I could have
> missed this, and as I expected, the book doesn't show
> this ancestorage.  In fact, the Persistent class isn't
> listed in Appendix B at all.

The paper books for zope 2 are all ancient. REALLY ancient.
The latest is here:
http://www.plope.com/Books/2_7Edition
It's also a bit old, but it has a *lot* of updates since the paper
version and even since the previous online edition.

IMO the community badly needs somebody to overhaul the Zope Book and
Zope Developers' Guide. Unfortunately, that's a *very* labor-intensive
job, and pretty much everybody with sufficient knowledge has too much
paying work to do that, myself included.  Kudos to Chris McDonough
and the contributors for getting the 2.7 edition as far as it got.

Meanwhile, zopewiki.org is very very useful.
 
> If you do not like the direction I'm headed, then by
> all means, do not follow.  Stick with Zope and enjoy
> it, but I personally think that a light-weight
> alternative that doesn't protect us from doing what we
> want to do would be better.

FWIW, there's lots of those.  Pylons maybe?

> [5] Several of you defended Zope by saying that it
> evolved to be the beast that it is.  Frankly, that's a
> terrible reason to live with a mess.

A large number of working deployments, OTOH, is a very good reason to
not throw away the past :)

>  Sometimes it
> takes starting over to get going in the right
> direction.

A couple of people have mentioned Zope 3 already...
We've been in the process of "starting over" for several years
now.  

There's simultaneously an evolution of Zope 2 to use more and more of
Zope 3.  Unfortunately this means zope 2 is going to get bigger before
it can get smaller. Read the archives of the zope3-dev list for some
ideas on how this might all pan out... Jim's message "Two visions" from
Feb. of this year.

People like to start from scratch, but sooner or later they
end up reinventing all the features they threw away :)
We're trying to find a way not to throw out all the good stuff.

> That's why I'm pushing to making it an Apache module. 

There has been some work done on running zope under Apache.
Google for modzope.

> Apache is wildly popular and used in a tremendous
> number of servers.  It already does most everything,
> so why re-invent the wheel?  Let's just add on the few
> missing pieces so we can give developers the tools
> they need to build the rest of the car.

"does most everything"?  "few missing pieces"? How can you compare
an HTTP server to a full-featured web development framework?

> So follow if you dare, help if you'd like, but shout
> your insults at my back.  I see no reason to stick
> around a community that treats me like this when I'm
> only trying to help.

FWIW, while I do think you have some misconceptions of where zope is 
going, I do think the tone got a lot harsher than necessary.

I haven't posted on your wiki because I prefer mailing lists.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com