Movies, audiences, wasted effort, was Re: [Zope3-dev] The vision thing

Paul Winkler pw_lists at slinkp.com
Mon Mar 6 20:20:22 EST 2006


On Mon, Mar 06, 2006 at 05:13:57PM -0700, Jeff Shell wrote:
> On 3/6/06, Paul Winkler <pw_lists at slinkp.com> wrote:
> > A similar app could've been written pretty quickly in Zope 3 by writing
> > a schema and using browser:addform, browser:editform, and
> > browser:schemadisplay.  It would be interesting to see how that would go
> > in the movie.  I suspect that the movie author (named Sean Kelly i
> > think?) would've complained about the xml "sit-ups" and the numerous
> > server restarts.
> 
> Those are bad options anyways. They do not have growth potential
> either, as you then have to make the conceptual leap from "something
> magically generated by this XML declaration" into "how do I customize
> what happens on edit?"

Actually I agree with you. Dynamic scaffolding has the
same problems I was complaining about re. TTW development:
it does a bunch of magic that you have to understand and know how to do
from scratch the moment you want to go beyond it.  In that paragraph I
was only trying to fit zope 3 into the kinds of things done in that
movie; some of his other examples are pretty magical too.  "I write this
UML model and presto, I get all this with zero lines of code, wow neat."

What I'd really like is something like what you say later on:

> This is an area where Rails is particularly strong. I'm normally not a
> fan of code generation. But their tool generates just-enough. It's
> code you can actually understand and start building from, and a quick
> run to the api docs they have online is usually all that's needed to
> start understanding the code you're looking at. The code their tool
> generates runs basically what you see if you have it dynamically
> providing 'scaffolding', so the conceptual difference between the
> automatically generated and what it gives you out of the box is pretty
> small.

OK, so what if we had a code generator that would read
some browser:addform/editform/schemadisplay directives and spit out some
functionally equivalent code (python, zcml, and zpt) that you could just
start using and editing?  I think that might be pretty handy.

> I really like the concept of through the web tweaking and
> manipulation. But I'm sick of templates and scripts. 

I'm not quite sick of templates yet, but I am sick of "scripts".
I still use them in CMF because they give me a convenient place
to do what I described: view-related glue that I can tweak
without restart.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com


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