[Zope-Annce] State of Zope 3

[Stephan Richter]

Hello to everyone in the Zope community and beyond, 

you might have wondered why you have not heard from the Zope 3 developer 
community for a while. Also, where in the world is the first alpha, not to 
mention the first beta that was planned for this Fall? Has the development 
stalled?

No, not at all! We are all still committed to produce one of the most advanced 
Internet Application Servers available. However, in recent months as more and 
more applications [1] were developed for Zope 3, we recognized issues with 
some of the fundamental components of Zope 3 and we decided to fix them 
before going any further. 

The first step of this code review was Parentgeddon, which removed 99% of the 
use of ContextWrappers, which was probably the worst single annoyance of Zope 
3. Next we noticed already a while ago, that Adapters as we have them now 
impose a limitation to their usefulness, since one can only map one interface 
to another. In the ongoing Adaptergeddon, this limitation is removed by 
allowing a set of N interfaces to be mapped to another interface. For details 
see the proposal [2]. After this -geddon is completed, we will release 
Milestone 4, which is currently scheduled for November 10.

But we are not done geddoning at that point. The security and containers also 
need some work. Currently, the application developer has to always write some 
annoying boilerplate and the relationships between containers and containees 
is not enforced. See the "Simplifying Implementing Containers" [3] and 
"Containment Constraints" [4] proposals for detail. After these final two 
major refactorings we will release Milestone 5 on December 1st or January 
1st, which will hopefully be the last one.

After MS 5, we will head towards the first alpha (in January 2004) and beta 
(in February 2004). From then on we will concentrate on efficiency, 
scalability, stability, as well as on API and GUI cleanups.

The upcoming development will be supported by two sprints. Jim will go to 
India in December and there will be an UI sprint in Australia in February.

If you have general questions about Zope 3, please do not hesitate to send a 
mail to zope3-dev at zope.org. For concerns and remarks about the release 
schedule feel free to send an E-mail directly to stephan.richter at tufts.edu.

Sincerely,
The Zope 3 Development Team

[1] http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Zope3Products
[2] http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ComponentArchitectureSimplification
[3] http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/SimplifyImplementingContainers
[4] http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ContainmentConstraints