[Zope] Zope.org fading away ..

[Rich Harley]

On 12 Mar 2014, at 10:05, zopyxfilter at gmail.com wrote:

> Rich Harley wrote:
>> It might be better if the whole zope project is handed over to somebody willing to move it forward.
> 
> The whole Zope project is as open as an open-source project can be.

It’s not that Zope isn’t as open source as it can be, it’s that anyone building a new application will not use Zope, which is clearly a problem for longevity since in another 3 years there will be even less people using Zope as more and more legacy applications get rewritten. 

Personally we are very embedded with Zope 2.11. It’s excellent for what we are using it for and we are incredibly grateful of the community that built that product over the last 10 years. We use Zope in a very simple way for just holding python code, handling roles and connecting out to a Postgres DB but there are other frameworks which would do the same thing in a leaner way now. Still, we are not looking to rewrite because it does what we need well, although the version control is more hassle than it should be.

> What is the problem here?

The problem is how to attract new developers to rebuild a Zope fit for life from 2015+. That would mean making the framework more modern in every sense but still retaining the features that made Zope great in the past like excellent security handling and a quick development cycle. This is not an easy task and would probably involve some rebranding as the Zope name is now associated with an old framework.


> The decade of the large application servers and frameworks is over.

Possibly but Zope could have moved with the times and evolved with the momentum it had 5 years ago instead of being usurped by frameworks like Django and Turbogears which any python dev would choose over Zope in a heartbeat these days if they wanted to build a scalable application. This is what needs to be addressed - or is it your opinion that Zope will die and there’s nothing we can do about it? That seems a shame to me.

Rich



> 
>> 
>> It’s pretty obvious the various parts that make up the community like mailing lists, website, forums etc have been dead or dying for a long time.
>> 
>> Will Zope ever get back to 2005-2006 levels…? See : http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=zope
>> 
> 
> 
> -aj