[Zope3-Users] development workflow

[Jachin Rupe]

hi there

I'm new to Zope development from the PHP realm.  When I worked in PHP  
I would, write a little code, save it, refresh the browser and see  
what happened.

Initially I tried to do that in Zope and as you can imagine I decided  
very quickly that having to restart Zope after I made every change  
and then waiting for it to restart was just not going to work.

(bunny trail:  I've got a 1.67 ghz G4 PowerBook with 1 gig of Ram, is  
" root Startup time: 32.328 sec real, 16.860 sec CPU" about where I  
should be or am I doing something terribly wrong if it's taking me  
that long to start zope?)

After some reading it sounds like the way to go with Zope is to just  
write lots of those "tests", which run much much quicker.  So my  
development processes looks something like this:

1. write code
2. write tests
3. run tests
4 debug
5. repeat steps 1-4 until there's a whole bunch of new features and I  
can't stand not trying them out.
6. restart zope and try things out.

Is that how Zope 3 development is supposed to work?

Right now I'm concerned about what will happen when I start testing  
the security and the design (skin).  My guess is there are mechanisms  
to write tests to try out the the security settings but if I makes  
design changes I obviously can't look at those via the command line.   
Am I going to have to restart zope every-time I tweak something and  
want to see how my changes look?  Are there good tools and techniques  
that will make the "skinning" of zope easier and faster?

thanks

-jachin