[Zope3-dev] Who would use this crazy thing called Zope 3?

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi,

Let me play devil's advocate for just a moment Let me run around for a  
while like a headless chicken. Please don't shoot me, I'm actually quite  
in love with Zope 3. But I can see myself having this argument many times  
in the future, so I'd like some good answers.

As a developer, I have a lot of respect for the fearlessness with which  
you refactor the software. Seriously fundamental things, like ZCML and the  
ZODB and ZAPI are up for discussion just as freely as simpler parts.  
Perhaps that is just a testament to how flexible and powerful Zope 3 is  
and how easily interchangeable its components are.

But it also scares the crap out of me. I read a whole book about Zope 3  
that came with two chapters marked as deprecated by the time it hit the  
printing presses. I read what scant documentation there is (apart from the  
excellent interface documentation and internal documentation like  
doctests) and see that each tutorial makes fundamentally different  
assumptions. You have an admirably well-controlled process for  
deprecation, but the cycle is what - a year? By the time I've finished my  
application, I'll have a migration headache if I want to take advantage of  
the latest and greatest features or even non-backported bug fixes; by the  
time I've made my cool new add-on module, the API it depends upon spews  
out deprecation warnings.

My question is: will it ever slow down? Are you trying to evolve the most  
aesthetically perfect framework or the most useful and reliable one? How  
do people that have taken the plunge and developed on Zope 3 deal with  
these changes? Should I really view it as one evolving framework, or as a  
series of partially disconnected attempts and abandon hope for forward  
compatability?

Now: Please prove me all wrong. :-)

Thanks,
Martin

-- 
(muted)