[Zope3-Users] Zope eggification - impressions

[Baiju M]

Hermann Himmelbauer wrote:
>  Am Mittwoch, 6. Februar 2008 18:24 schrieb Baiju M:
> > In fact, I started an effort to document this, but I want more help
> >  from this group.  I had announced two book projects to this list
> > earlier. The first one was a failure [1], but the second one I
> > succeded with help from you all [2].  I am going to re-start the
> > first effort again, I hope this time it will be a success :)
> >
> > The new book, "Web Application Development Using Python and Zope
> > Components" will be available from here:
> > http://wadupaz.muthukadan.net/
>
>  Thanks for the link and your effort, this is somehow helpful.
>  However, I have the following suggestions (regarding the buildout
>  part):

Thanks for your feedback.  I am not really an expert in Zope 3,
in fact this is my attempt to learn it :)

>  1) Like so often in the Zope world, I miss the "big picture" - I (or
>  better, the newbies) don't really know what's happening here. What
>  exactly is buildout? What's an Egg/setuptools/PyPi? (references would
>  also help here). I'd very much appreciate illustrations, something
>  like simple block diagrams that show, for example, how buildout pulls
>  together needed modules.

I will try to explain it in the second chapter.

>  2) Much content is in a recipe-like fashion, for instance on page 4
>  you specify in install_requires "zope.app.zcmlfiles, zope.app.twisted
>  and zope.app.securitypolicy". Why do you use exactly these modules?
>  Are they the very minimum for Zope3? What about other modules, e.g.
>  formlib? Is there some overview for available modules?

I am not very sure where I should add details about these "bare minimum"
packages.  Anyway, I will add a brief intro about it in the first 
chapter itself.

>  3) Page 5 and 6 is not understandable for newcomers - they can simply
>  cut & paste the code but they will never know what happens here as
>  they lack the knowledge of e.g. what a ZopeSecurityPolicy is, how the
>  ZopeDB works etc. I, too, don't really know where my instance data
>  will be situated (var/, log/, site-packages/ etc/). I think things
>  would be a lot easier if the user can call some "mkzopeinstance"
>  script as in the tarballs that does this stuff for him.

Explaining everything in the first chapter would be difficult, I will 
continue this
example in the 3rd chapter (yet to be written) and explain it there.

>  4) When using eggs, packages are normally kept in an ".egg" file,
>  therefore I can't have a look at the Zope3 source code - which is
>  inevitable for Zope3 development. AFAIK, there's some option that
>  lets easy_install decompress the eggs and install it in plain text,
>  is this also the case in your book?

This is one problem with eggs.  I am going to reccomend checkout Zope 3
source for looking at code.

>  5) The book gives me the overall impression that installing Zope3 the
>  egg-style way requires me to do quite some really complicated stuff
>  I even don't really understand in full depth. Compared to that,
>  installing Zope3 from the tarball is a lot easier - it's basically
>  about "./configure, make install, mkzopeinstance", which is not
>  complicated at all.

Installing Zope using 'zopeproject' [1] would be much easier.
But, for time being, I am not going to include it.

Nowadays, peoples are moving away from pure Zope 3 application
development, instead they will use Grok, Zope 2,Plone etc.
So, this is my experiment with truth [2] (pun intended)

 [1] http://pypi.python.org/pypi/zopeproject
 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_My_Experiments_with_Truth

Regards,
Baiju M