[ZPT] ZPT advocacy

[Andreas Vallen]

Hi,

I've recently had an exchange with Peter Bengtsson about
his nice ZPT/DTML - comparison page.

Now he alerted me to the existence of a ZPT-mailing list and
here I am.
[Notice to evan: please mention the list under 
http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists as that's where
I and probably others have looked].

I would like to draw your attention to that
kind of business plan (pamphlet?) I hacked last night.
While its premier aim is finding a way to do a business
based on Zope, it contains some amount of ZPT-advocacy 
as well.

And ZPT can use any support it can muster. So here's
the relevant part. Head over to 
http://www.zope.org/Members/vallen2/ for the whole 
thing. If anyone thinks he can use it for propaganda ;-) do!

see you,
Andreas


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...
(2) The second major problem we have is the separation of content, logic and 
presentation.

"Long before solved" one should think regarding the wealth of supposedly 
"Model-View-Controller" patterns in the application server domain: ASP, PHP, 
JSP and DTML.

Not true! Most of you will know it: Above mentioned templating mechanisms 
while better than Perl-cgiing at their time of birth have introduced their 
own plethora of problems. In fact it were the same old ones: Logic inside 
presentation.
While it is impossible to edit a cgi-script with a WYSIWYG-editor editing 
these templates is not a pleasant experience either - if at all possible.
I as a Java-devotee have of course taken delight in JSP - until I used it too 
much. I have not coded in the other above mentioned templating languages (not 
even DTML), but I know for sure that the result is the same:

They leave a hell of a mess.

But good we have DC. Apart of creating our platform, one of the advantages of 
having a commercial "mother" as an open-source community is that they often 
better sense the shortcomings of the platform regarding its use by people not 
being fluent in all the languages of choice at any given moment (e.g. DTML).

And I assume that no designer wants to see or even learn 
"dtmlmethod(_.None,_)". God - not even I want to see something like this. But 
I think I have to: I'm a coder.
So what did DC do?

Short: they created the ultimate weapon. The solution. The thing that made me 
think my business idea is feasible, no: damned to success:Page Templates

I'm not in a mood to explain them. Just go to the ZPT site. Simply know that 
they are a groundbreaking mechanism to separate logic, content and 
presentation in such a way that page-designers can reliably edit their 
dynamic pages inside any WYSIWYG-editor without having any problems.

Contrast this to any(!) other of the established templating mechanisms which 
will make these editors terribly confused and unusable, what is quite sure 
your fate if you don't happen to speak the language of the tools' company 
(Microsoft: ASP!, even Macromedia may cease support for anything but CFML 
from Allaire Coldfusion (whom they bought) and JSP: Think about choice Mr. 
IT-manager! No one got ever fired for choosing choice! ;-) )

In some way the content<->logic separation is even better accomplished by 
XMLC (a separation mechanism employed by the java application server 
"Enhydra"), which ZPT was inspired by, but enhydra XMLC lacks other crucial 
features which in my opinion second it.

I try to advertise ZPT because I feel many seasoned developers shun this new 
technology. Even DC seems to be afraid of saying DTMLers: "Stop coding DTML. 
There's something new in town and it is vastly superior!" Understandable - 
given the fact that zopistas like too hack and ZPT superficially (ok ... 
really - but only a bit) seems to have less expressiveness.

But that's the same the new Python Scripts are also all about: Stop enmeshing 
logic and content!
The results are more but rewarding and as I said enabling my business - 
because they tackle our second problem: separating the logic from the content.
... 

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