[Zope3-dev] Calling persistent function

[Casey Duncan]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2004 11:53:06 -0500
Paul Winkler <pw_lists at slinkp.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 22, 2004 at 10:17:31AM -0500, Casey Duncan wrote:
> > If it were up to me (and it isn't) I would be inclined to punt on
> > this until Zope 3.1.
> 
> good lord, when will THAT be?
> I tend to agree with Jim - SiteScripter is an important class
> of users - because I wear that hat sometimes.

What we move to Zope 3.1 will make 3.0 happen sooner. Zope 3 is larger
than Zope X3 or Zope 3.0. I think we need to be practical with what Zope
3.0 is.

To some degree I feel a considerable shift to a mode of "Make Zope 2
into Zope 3" (aka Zope 2.9). I'm sure Jim will share that vision with us
in due time. I'll save my pessimism about it until then ;^)
 
> >  I also don't believe the statement "They don't need to
> > know anything about the component model", that really depends on how
> > flat a pedestal is made for them above everything else. That will
> > require a degree of fit and polish that has arguably never even been
> > achieved in Zope 2.
> 
> I'm skeptical too, but it will be hard to know until we have
> something to play with.

For me, guilty until proven innocent on that one.
  
> > OTOH, all applications have their dirt and its nice to have a rug to
> > sweep it under instead of just letting it lie all over the house. I
> > also understand that this is a way to make the learning curve more
> > approachable.
> 
> Exactly. Think of a one-man shop working on a smallish dynamic
> website, consisting of a single developer who has perhaps built a site
> or two using PHP or some such, but who has never used zope 2 or 
> 3 before and has to learn it all from scratch

That is a stated goal for Zope 3. Currently we are man years away from
meeting it IMO.
 
> Currently, to start zope 3, he'd have to learn python, page templates,
> 
> zcml, the component architecture, and existing services to get much of
> 
> anything done. At the very least, we should provide an entry 
> route that doesn't require zcml and requires little (if any)
> understanding of the component architecture.  We will need
> something equivalent to the z2 API reference.

For the above hypothetical person to use it, there very first thing you
would need is a final release of Zope 3. I think there is a strong
chance that more people would get involved if it were released earlier
and didn't necessarily cater as well to newbies, but it was the goal to
make it do so. I'm also being selfish here, I'm tired of fighting Zope 2
;^)

Also, I'm not sure how you go about understanding an API reference for
Zope 3 without understanding "when" an API is relevant. This requires
knowing about adapters, utilities, services and interfaces. Perhaps this
does not mean understanding the component architecture, but I'm not sure
how.

I'm happy to be proven completely wrong of course.

-Casey