[Grok-dev] Re: Grok and Ajax : KSS ?

[Luciano Ramalho]

On 7/24/07, Martijn Faassen <faassen at startifact.com> wrote:
> It's also very unique to the Zope world though - people outside of the
> Zope world are unlikely to have come across it.

I know that Godefroid and Balazs are trying hard to make KSS something
not exclusive to Zope. ZPT started as a Zope thing but has been ported
to other frameworks. I think KSS has an even better chance of
succeeding at that.

> If one would use some kind of well-known "traditional" javascript
> library/ajax framework, the learning curve for newcomers might be a lot
> less, as they might already be familiar with those approaches.

I'd say very few people are comfortable with the current approaches of
doing AJAX.

> We can also reuse a lot of the existing documentation, pointing to that.

That's a good point, but KSS will probably have it's own documentation
as well (maybe it already has oodles of docs; I haven't checked
lately).

> On the other hand, if someone is a complete newcomer to web developer,
> following traditional ways of doing things matter less and KSS may be a
> better fit.

I agree. Besides, once somebody decides to look into a web framework
that does not depend on a RDBMS for storage, they are already looking
for something radically different. If we can offer something radically
different but clearly superior, we'll be fine. We'll never compete
with PHP (or Rails) in popularity, precisely because of the ZODB, but
that's OK.

Cheers,

Luciano

PS. Random thought: for many years, when I had my company, I tried to
sell the XP philosophy to my clients but never succeeded. And I
wondered how Kent Beck did it. Then one day I realized that initially
Kent Beck was hired not because of his XP ideas, but because of his
Smalltalk expertise. Once a client is committed to such an "alien"
technology as Smalltalk, and hires the "alien guru", they are probably
ready to take any advice from him. If he told them the team had to
code shirtless, they'd probably give it a try. I am not sure how this
relates to the KSS story, besides the fact that Zope, Grok and KSS are
all "alien technology", but I wanted to share this with the list...