[Zope3-dev] Re: RFC: abolishing python: expressions in ZPT TALES

Jeff Shell eucci.group at gmail.com
Wed Jan 4 11:11:38 EST 2006


On 1/3/06, Wade Leftwich <wade at leftwich.us> wrote:
> Andreas Jung wrote:
> > To bring it to the point: _scripters_ should be able to develop in Zope
> > 3 as easy as in Zope 2 :-)
>
> Or at least almost as easily as in RoR or Django. TTW is not a
> requirement; Chris McDonough's "TTB" posting was right on target
> (http://www.plope.com/Members/chrism/ttb_programming).

Are those 'scripters'?

I see RoR and Django going down the same path that Zope 2 went down.
They're great, they're young, they're inexperienced. Django's horrible
query syntax reminds me of the cryptic early index querying that Zope
/ Principia had that was geared primarily for input coming in from web
forms and not scripting. I see both of those projects taking either
shortcuts or blanket "we only do things this way" statements. [Django:
"we don't support HTTP auth. We've never needed it."].

It's not to say they're bad products at all. To work in Django, you
essentially are using Django's "admins", which apparently many of
their target users don't mind. This is akin to just using and
promoting the Plone UI, the ZMI (zope 2 or zope 3's) or whatever.
Neither I nor my customers have wanted those UIs. I love Zope 3 for
finally giving me the freedom of detaching from the ZMI completely
(with me having the option to use it for emergencies, but our own much
more focused skins should do the job well enough to not need it).

> There are 3 PHP developers in the group I work in, and they know they
> want something better, and they like Python. But when they look at Z3
> they get all upset & confused.

I like Ruby. But when I look at rails I get all upset and confused. I
still have no idea how its widgets work. With Zope 3, I was able to
follow the adapter lookup chain. Granted, I'm pretty familiar with
Zope 3's component architecture by now.

Zope 3 needs better advocacy. It needs better web site(s). If
zope3.org turns out to be a Wiki I promise to take extra medication
and try to add some helpful material to it as possible, because I
think Zope 3 is really lacking in different levels of tutorials from
different authors who have different perspectives that may better help
different audiences. *whew!*

That's the problem. It's great that there are books out there. But
there's no good central and well promoted advocacy sites. Many Zope 3
developers, like myself, I imagine are often very heavy with real work
engagements and finding spare time to write and advocate aren't there.

> Is this (increased usability for non-experts) a possible project for the
> Zope sprint at Pycon? I'll be there. And since I am not an expert
> myself, I will have a head start.

I still think that a great "increased usability" could come from a
zope3 focused web site that is simple and fun. With the time based
releases, it's known what's going to be in each release. My gods, I'd
LOVE to see articles like "Exploring Zope 3.x: New feature -
Viewlets". I'd LOVE to see clear documents like "Exploring Zope 3.x:
what's deprecated, why, and how to fix it."

The doctest documentation about content providers, forms, and viewlets
are great for experts. At least there's fairly comprehensive
documentation that I can read and figure out and go "ahh!". But
turning that into a more comprehensive non-expert story on a web site
would be a good thing.


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