[Zope3-dev] Re: [Zope-dev] Re: Two visions

[Janko Hauser]

Am 02.03.2006 um 14:13 schrieb Rocky Burt:

> On Tue, 2006-28-02 at 13:21 +0100, Martijn Faassen wrote:
>> Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
>> [snip]
>>> I would vote for spelling out Zed (which would also be a little  
>>> easier
>>> to google but might create trademark problems). The namespace  
>>> package
>>> could either be 'z' or 'zed'.
>>>
>>> Then again, I really should take Jim's side and stay out of naming
>>> decisions.
>>
>> Let's please not have a naming discussion again. I think renaming  
>> Zope 3
>> is really bad marketing myself and naming discussions mostly a  
>> waste of
>> time...
>
> As I sit here spending sooo much time reading this thread, I've  
> finally
> decided its time to throw in my own naive point of view as an ex-J2EE
> developer and a Zope 2 developer that generally builds applications on
> top of Zope2/CMF/Plone.

Thanks Rocky encouraged me to not stay out of this discussion any  
longer :-)

My perspective is from someone who has decided early on (more than  
two years ago) to start using zope3 technics and approaches in Zope2  
land. I now have a bigger project under my belt, which is probably  
one of the biggest zope2/five installations, a portal with 300  
subsites in one instance. But that's actually not the main point.  
What I face is the interaction with former contractors of this  
customer, who we should explain the system, the technology and also  
sometimes the history of this zope island. And this is quite a  
difficult expirience, at least for me.

We started this with the goal to transform this to a pure zope3  
application sometime, when zope3 the technology and zope3 the main  
developer community is ready. So we had a goal, if we will succeed is  
dependant on much more than pure technology. And this is my view,  
which are only a list of opinions. I hope I can come to a conclusion  
in the end.

- Five is a migration path to "something". For us it was always the  
hope that this something is something different than the current  
Zope2. So we accepted that there are quirks, in the believe, that  
this can be removed if a "cleaner" ground can be used.

- Adopting Five and the z3 stuff as an additional resource for Zope2  
and keep going with z2 is dangerous. My head starts swirling if I  
imagine about the enhancement of AT with z3 technics, it becomes more  
and more complex, more and more abstractions need to be understood,  
dependancy-lists become longer and longer. The sheer amount of source  
code is huge.

- The naming discussion leads to the direction to have "Zed"  
something like an additional library which can be used with Zope2.  
This hints the usage as an additional layer. We will see products,  
which are not pure z3 accessable via Five, but which are using both  
and create a new kind of product style, without the intention to move  
this to a pure z3 solution.

- If I understand Jim right, he asks, if the z3 developer should  
abandon the development of the z3 application server and concentrate  
more on the restructuring of the z2 application server. Given the  
potential support which can be leveraged if the big z2-communities  
(CPS and Plone seem to be the only ones) can be involved, that sounds  
reasonable. I fear that it would be nevertheless quite hard, and that  
there is not really a big success at least not such a big success, as  
the current clean reimplementation of zope3.

- My obersvation from the various discussions here is, that the  
people who are using z3 are using it quite differently, much more  
creative. This is part of the success to leave the zope-island. And  
this leads in some way to uncertainties for the "traditional" z2  
developer. On the one side there is the freedom to replace the main  
template engine, but this makes it more difficult for a newcomer to a  
project.

- Similar to this theme ,"leaving the island", is the explosion of  
components we will see. The Zope community has already identified  
this and the great packing efforts are underway. Nevertheless it will  
be more difficult to understand all these different components, they  
are not as approachable as the current products.  There will be  
bigger components or more application like packages, but the freedom  
for the developer also means that the components will be more varied,  
using different concepts, will not fit as tightly together as the  
current line of CMF/CPS/Plone products. I have the feeling that this  
is sometimes missed in the ongoing discussions. We try to find the  
one and only solution, where on the other side we opened up the  
framework to use quite different solutions.

Ok, what's my conclusion. I think a repackaging is good and perhaps  
also the building of bigger mega-packages. But the z2 community needs  
to have a goal to evolve to and this needs to be better, and needs to  
have features which encourage them to adpopt the new plattform. And I  
hope that this plattform is a better z3 application server, much in  
the same spirit as the current z3 framework is a better z2 framework.  
And z2 developers should face, that they need to rethink and rewrite  
some of their products.

Thanks, if you read such far, I hope this does not sound to pathetic,  
if so it isn't meant so.

With regards,

__Janko