[Zope3-dev] Re: Grok sprint 2 reports

[Martin Aspeli]

Peter Bengtsson wrote:
>> Philipp has posted a blog entry with a good example of Grok code:
>>
>> http://www.z3lab.org/sections/blogs/philipp-weitershausen/2007_01_09_you-thought-zope-3-wasn
>>
> Gorgeous!
> I especially like that you don't have to manually define the template
> since it's picked up automatically by name.
> 
> Will the grok effort yield any codegenerating scripts and stuff like
> the django folks have?
> If not, I have some ideas that I could maybe contribute with at/for
> the next sprint even :)

Code generation sucks. :)

But:

  - ArchGenXML (hacky though it is) is great for business types because 
it takes UML (which business analysts understand and customers can be 
talked through) and produces content types they can CRUD with. 
Seriously, I've seen people sell big Plone jobs on AGX (kinda scary).

  - Don't invent a new code generator. Please. :) PasteScript does quite 
well, and seems to be adopted by others, e.g. Pylons. We already use it 
to make new egg-like packages for Plone.

  - You should never, ever *need* code generation. It should be a nice 
way of getting a common structure for second-order stuff like 
documentation files and egg metadata (how we use ZopeSkel/paster in 
Plone), or a way of going from a visual representation to code. Systems 
that *depend* on generators are always nasty to maintain, upgrade and 
understand. Tools are just not a replacement for good language design 
(this is why we see the Java->Rails exodus cliche, and then people 
realise Rails has tools too, oh well).

Martin