[Grok-dev] Re: Admin UI name change suggestion

[Martijn Faassen]

TIm Terlegård wrote:
> On Oct 5, 2007, at 10:18 AM, Luciano Ramalho wrote:
>> On 10/4/07, Wichert Akkerman <wichert at wiggy.net> wrote:
>>> I suspect the majority of sites will run a single grok app per instance.
>>
>> I am not so sure about that, Wichert. In fact, I think one of the
>> advantages of the current way of doing things is encouraging the
>> development of sites as a collection of small apps, each with their
>> own lifecycles, a not as one huge monolithic app which has to be
>> upgraded all at once.
> 
> I get confused by the definition "app" and grok.Application. What are they
> exactly? And is a "grok app" synonymous with grok.Application?
> 
> To me an application is a fat client written with Qt, Cocoa or whatever. In
> the web and grok world I guess an app is the actual site (not the zope3
> term site)? Or is a site composed of a number of apps? I would guess
> grok.Application is the actual site root. It sounds like Luciano thinks
> something else. Could someone explain this a bit?

You could see Grok as an application container. You can write multiple 
web applications and install them into a single application container.

A web application is typically stand-alone, in that it doesn't need 
other applications to function. Then again, a system like Django makes 
this a grey area, as I believe they use the word "application" for 
something like "component with UI", though still "fairly standalone 
component with UI". I imagine this is what Luciano is referring to.

I do not know of Grok-based examples of this practice. It would be 
interesting to explore what exactly Django is doing in this area. Fine 
grained components such as Zope 3 offers are nice, but sometimes more 
coarse grained components would be nice (full-featured user management + 
UI for it, for instance would make for a nice one).

I think 'app' is what the user sees (and the site manager can install, 
right now), and 'grok.Application' is the way to create such things and 
make them installable.

Regards,

Martijn