[ZPT] Web Design with ZPT

[Joseph Griffin]

Thanks again for the response Joel,
My background has been mostly with Microsoft. When I ran across Zope, I was
truly impressed with the idea of an object oriented website. Since it's
free, it's gets double bonus points from me. What I have learned in software
development is that the pros (that is, those persons whose sole interest is
making money) go 10 miles out of their way to streamline their efforts into
a boring repeatable pattern than lowers overall risk. Zope, in my opinon, is
ripe for a deployment tool in the form of a database/python/ZPT script
generator. This assumes that the Zope/ZServer/ZODB etc... has stable
interfaces. After all, Zope is database friendly, so once a datamodel is
defined, you could build the initial Zope website from the data model along
(something like Znolk, but on a much larger scale). Database scripts would
build the tables, python scripts could do the framework installation and ZPT
would present the data. The whole install could be automated to the point of
establishing a complete web layout is less than a week. This type of code
generation has been done by Promatix for Visual FoxPro (www.promatrix.com),
Microsoft Access,SQL Server,Oracle,Sybase, and DB2 using VBExpress
(www.vbexpress.com).

To make the whole thing platform compatiable, write it in Javascript using a
browser as GUI and XML as a database. Do you think other people would be
interested in doing something like this? Obviously there is a thousand
issues to resolve, but if you want to make Bill Gates the 2nd richest man in
America, web applications are probably the future in software development.
Joseph

-----Original Message-----
From: zpt-admin@zope.org [mailto:zpt-admin@zope.org]On Behalf Of Joel
Burton
Sent: Saturday, March 02, 2002 1:39 PM
To: Joseph Griffin
Cc: zpt@zope.org
Subject: RE: [ZPT] Web Design with ZPT


On Sat, 2 Mar 2002, Joseph Griffin wrote:

> Joel, thanks for your response. Let me phrase my question differently.
Deep
> inside the bowels of Zope dot com there are a group of developers that
> decided what features Zope should have based on how they wanted to use the
> software in their consulting services (which pays their bills). I suspect
in
> order to keep their labor costs down, they have adopted a strict regime
for
> designing, contructing, and maintaining websites for their customers. I
have
> read (and in some cases studied) a lot of the Zope book's contents. The
book
> explains what the features are and how to use them in simple examples, but
I
> have yet to find text that explains how to build a dynamic *and* low
> maintance web site. It may not be in Zope dot com's best interest because
it
> could cut into the need for consulting services. What do you think? Joseph

I've met many of the principals on ZC in social or work settings, but I
obviously can't speak for ZC. But I can speak about what I think...

Clearly, ZC wants to stay in business and make money doing it. So, in some
way, they'd love to get as consulting clients every profitable job they
could handle. But, realistically, they're not the right scale or fit for
some work, and probably coudln't scale overnight to handling every piece
of Zope consulting work. So, realistically, they know there will be other
players. (For instance, most of my work is with progressive nonprofit
corporations, which sometimes is a task of love not profit. It can be
difficult to make traditional profit margins working with some of the
groups that I love to call clients, but, hey, I'm a leftist masochist ;-)
)

So, ZC faces the question: knowing that they can't get/don't want all the
Zope consulting, should they help other consulting firms/designers? I
think the answer is *yes* and I think they realize that as well. The more
good Zope people there are out there, the more good Zope sites and
knowledge there are out there, the more Zope's stock rises, and therefore,
the more ZC's stock rises (Note for instance how they moved from Digicool
to ZopeCorp--completely trying ot tie their identity in with the growing
strength of Zope).

To this end, they've helped their staff write good documentation (the Zope
Book), they've sent their staff to user group meetings (Paul, Jim,
Andreas, and Chris W have all presented at the DC User Group meeting,
for instance.)

Does Zope have great documentation? Not as good as some. Some areas are
especially rough (CMF, for instance, is very early in the documentation
process), some are quite good.

Zope.org is a fantastic site, considering it doesn't bring profit directly
to ZC. Sure, I'd focus on make improvements to it (A librarian to help
rescue from mediocrity the nuggets of good stuff in the HOWTOs and Tips
would be great, as would clean up of the contributed Products), but this
is material the community could help on. ZC hasn't always been as "open
source feeling" as some companies (no direct CVS write access to
outsiders, etc.), but this has been changing in a positive direction,
IMHO.

Whew. But to your question "are there good examples of complete Zope
sites, rather than simple examples?" Some. The source for ZopeLabs and
ZopeZen are both available, and they're great sites. Sourece for every
page is zope.org is available with the link at the bottom.

A few months ago, I offered to open up a real-world site I designed so
that others could see how I structured it, integrated RDMS, etc. I said
that, before I could do this, it needed a security audit to make sure that
I wasn't going to open up my client to outsiders having inside information
on their security flaws. Unfortunately, no one offered to be an set of
outside eyes for this, and the idea was dropped by me. If experienced Zope
developers can help with this, I'd be happy to clone the site onto my
personal server and grant anonymous viewers read-only access to management
screens, etc. (or just make the whole thing a .zexp)

Dieter Maurer has also been writing a book that will walk through the
creation of a real site. It looks as if the work on the book has stalled,
but a public kind word to Dieter about this can't hurt. ;-)

In short: no, there aren't perfect resources about the real-world zope
site structuring decisions. But rather than blame ZC in any way, I think
they've been incredible partners to our community. I think it makes more
sense to thank ZC, then figure out ways that we can provide this help to
each other.

[apologies for zillion typos. i'm visiting my parents today, and they have
a 28.8 connection. Eep!]

--

Joel BURTON  |  joel@joelburton.com  |  joelburton.com  |  aim: wjoelburton
Independent Knowledge Management Consultant


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