[Zope3-Users] interview for my diploma thesis about Zope 3 in education

Dominique Lederer dominique.lederer at inode.at
Wed Jan 24 05:36:34 EST 2007


David Johnson schrieb:
>> * Do you think Zope (3) can be used at school or university level to
>> support topics in computer science education? What topics would you
>> recommend? Why?
> I definitely think Zope 3 can be used to support education.  We plan on
> developing a number of applications in this area. It seems at present
> that universities are focusing on J2EE and .NET, like most companies. 
> We are also noticing an increasing ability of universities to do their
> own development.  Traditionally many of the software applications that
> universities use have been purchased. We see an increasing desire to
> build and customize applications in house.  We also find however that in
> universities the funding and resources required to manage a J2EE or a
> .NET project are not necessarily there.  We believe Zope could fill this
> role because it is faster to develop in, and python is fairly easy to
> learn.  We find that universities tend to have developers who are a bit
> less experienced, and this sometimes includes administrators who
> actually want to do their own development.  J2EE and .NET is not easy to
> pick up for the novice. In this area Zope 3 is particularly challenging
> in comparison to Zope 2, however there are entry points in Zope 3 with a
> minimal amount of TTW development.  In this sense I personally feel
> strongly that Zope 3 needs to have a greater emphasis on TTW development
> so that it can satisfy the needs of the intermediate developers.  
> However I feel that Zope 3 is such a clean and well developed platform
> that more of these tools will show up.

i am definitly with you on your thoughts. i also think that zope,
especially zope 3 is a great tool supporting an educational
infrastructure. schooltool shows us how to do that.

but my question was more about how could someone use Zope 3 *in* his
curriculum. my thoughts are like being able to teach topics like
software development process, testing strategies (in my opinion software
testing is bad supported in education), documenting software (doctests),
....

and all this stuff should have an easy approach (installing,
maintaining, developing), both for educators/lectors and students. i
think Zope 3 could do a great job there, and i would like to know the
community´s optinion about that.


>> * How do you see Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE) related to
>> Zope 3? What are the differences? Is Zope 3 an alternative for other
>> component based frameworks in the industry and why?
>>
> I'm not sure I understand the question on this one.  Zope can be used to
> provide components in an XML-RPC model, or just about any other; this is
> the nature of the content view model of Zope.

This question has a litle bit historical background. At my university
they taught us Component Based Software Engineering (CBSE), and how this
will change the way, software will be developed. Software development
will(may) change to an industry where focus is on components, reuse and
testing (at the moment thousends of developers code the same stuff)
In the same course they talked about CORBA, COM+ and EJB. My question
is: Can they also talk about Zope 3 there?

Hope that this question is more clear now.

> 
> One point of view. Hope it helps.

yes, thanks for your reply!!

hope to get more :)

cheers Dominique


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