[Zope3-dev] Re: a plan for widgets?

[Jeff Shell]

On 3/17/06, Fred Drake <fdrake at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 3/17/06, Martijn Faassen <faassen at infrae.com> wrote:
> > As far as I understood, vocabularies are on the way out in Zope 3.3:
> >
> > in zope.schema.interfaces:
> >
> > # BBB vocabularies are pending deprecation, hopefully in 3.3
>
> That's correct.  Gary and I invented vocabularies to solve some
> problems.  Jim followed up with "sources", which have fewer warts.  In
> Zope 3.2, Benji and I added iterable and named sources, so I think
> sources now have the same basic range of functionality as
> vocabularies.  It should now be possible to use a source wherever a
> vocabulary was used in the past.

And it's all incredibly confusing. "Gluttony of choice" they call it.
I settled on Vocabularies for an interesting widget/requirement
because they were documented in the book. Trying to translate
doctest-speak to how-do-i-make-this-work-in-my-project-speak on
Sources was hard.

Many ways of doing things, no way to understand when to choose one
over the other. And it was frustrating to finally figure out
vocabularies and see the "oh, but they'll probably be deprecated soon"
comment in the code.

Not that I have anything against Sources. But for me, sources and
vocabularies were another long headache. My fancy vocabulary and
widget implementation is *GREAT* and now I understand the reasoning
behind the design. But the road there was very long.

And I still have absolutely no idea how the queriable stuff is
supposed to behave.

> > I may have this wrong, but that's what I read in the code. We've used
> > vocabularies before, but apparently they're deprecated.
>
> Please try to revise your applications to use sources.  If there's
> anything missing for sources, it may make sense to delay the
> deprecation of vocabularies.  It would also indicate that what needs
> to be added to allow sources to replace vocabularies.

Vocabularies are at least documented in the Zope 3 books that are out
there. It took me a couple of re-reads of the chapter just to
understand *them*. I printed out the Source doctest docs and started
down an implementation path in a different application, but I didn't
get far (mostly due to that experience being an experiment).

I'm going to keep pushing the guys I work with to let me have a
sandbox where I can put up a site with recipes and tips and whatnot.
If I'm supposed to "try to revise my application to use sources",
there needs to be a couple of good narrative pieces about what this
means. I depend heavily on custom vocabularies for a customer
application I'm about to resume work on this week. I don't think I'm
going to have time to do any such revision. But I would like to know
(or help others know) how to apply such a revision in the future.

--
Jeff Shell