[Zope3-Users] Re: stuffing the request object in zope3

[Tim Middleton]

Gary Poster wrote:
> FWIW, we're trying to reduce the "frightening" and "magical" aspect
> of the glue. :-)  That said, glue still has its place, and I think
> zcml is actually working out pretty well overall.

I take no small amount of comfort in strange frequency of finding Shane
Hathaway's "Zope 3 Frustration" blog entry showing up in my various google
search results ... and the term "frustration" isn't even in my search
terms, honest! (-; I say to myself... if Shane is frustrated... how can I
*not* be at least a little confused? Anyhow, more specifically, his mention
of not being able to find any debugging tools for ZCML I think is fairly a
strong indictment. But that's another topic. 

> http://www.benjiyork.com/quick_start.txt

Ah thanks for this pointer. Can't have too many beginner tutorials. I've
read a few already and considered maybe writing one from a slightly
different perspective than those i've yet seen, if I survive... 

I don't think my problem is so much the code, or even the alien ZCML api
actually... mine seems to me is a conceptual problem (if i may say... and I
believe all of my correspondants on this thread have also have been not shy
at pointing out in their own ways). I understand the theory of the Zope 3
approach... small adaptors rather than big classes/inheritance. I
understand also that this is an approach designed to scale for large
projects, while it may be a bit cumbersome for small things. 

I think i'd have a lot less problem with Zope 3 actually I was coming at it
as a beginner. I'd just accept what I read without reading more into it and
trying to refocus it through the prism of my existing code bases and
experiences. So I wonder if my difficulties aren't in large part due to all
the past coding and structural baggage, so to speak. I just can't seem
(yet) to make the clean divisions the way Zope 3 wants, or see how Zope 3
fits those parts together, despite all of the simple examples I've so far
been exposed to. All of the tutorials and books I've seen so far hit things
from a code/test driven perspective... maybe if i read enough of them
though one day (as was the case with me *finally* for Zope 2) the whole
puzzle will suddenly start to click together. 

I find it interesting though that while the object oriented paradigm seemed
pretty immediately intuitive and practical when I learnt it so many years
ago, for some reason the adaptor paradigm doesn't sink in... but rolls
around in my brain like so many beads of mercury. Again, I understand the
concepts, but the practical usage just doesn't seem to click. (This despite
having read the Shaver/Plug example in the Zope documentation many times
(and the other metaphors in various other documents and docstrings), which
makes perfect sense in the abstract, and perfect sense in the little
examples... yet... when i go to try to use it somehow it slips utility of
it slips away from me...) Perhaps it's just me. But, perhaps not... 

But I ramble again. 

>          if IRequest.providedBy(p):

Ha! Something's got to provide an IRequest in there eh. That's wicked. (-; I
fear Andreas Jung may be planning on hunting you down and killing you for
publishing this to the list. Or even worse... he may suggest you doing
something to yourself that involves... PHP. 

Thanks, though.