[Zope3-dev] DISCUSS: Consolidation of Zope 3 UI wiki pages

[Stephan Richter]

Since I really want to beat my point to death , here one more time:

Zope 3 is not yet ready for a UI Wisget System as discussed here! It lacks all 
sorts of framework tidbits!

If you guys want a good foundation for a UI, you need to really start thinking 
about the supporting infrastructure you need, which you probably accept 
having from Zope 2:

- Trees (for the ZODB and in General). Steve and I discussed already a good 
way of doing this. Read the Wiki pages for more info.

- A nice way to display the size of an object (note that showing the byte size 
is not always helpful. Getting the size in pixels for pictures should be 
possible too).

- We need a nice way to display other automatic object metadata easily, such 
as Add/Modification Date&Time, Create/Modify User and so on... (just the 
usual file stuff).

- Copy, Cut and Paste Support

- Improve the TranslationService Framework, so that you can localize dates, 
numbers and so on.

- Allow principals to store data (I think that works now), so we can store 
info about them.

- I think we do not have a SessionService either yet. So you will definitely 
need that for a good UI.

Notice that some things are listed in the ToDo list already, others are not. 
Once you are done with that, I would try to reconstruct a Zope 2 like ZMI to 
test whether you have all the functionality you need (I think this will be 
much harder than you imagine now!).

After you are done with all that, I think it will be time to study the latest 
Schema and Forms stuff carefully, since it can give you valueable hints on 
how to make a widget-oriented UI. 

There is also already a nice Zope 2 Layout product for Formulator by Peter 
Jentsch: http://www.zope.org/Members/pjentsch/FormulatorLayout. I don't know 
whether the latest release is as good as the CVS version, but I worked with 
Peter early in the development a bit to get a good design going. It is 
certainly not perfect or what we will finally need, but it takes this Widget 
approach, similar to Swing or wxPython, just for the Web.

Regards,
Stephan

PS: Sorry Martijn that I repeat some things I sent to you and the list 
earlier.
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training