[Zope-dev] Re: ZClasses useful! [Was: ZMI / JavaScript brainstorm]

[Jim Penny]

On Tue, May 07, 2002 at 05:35:55PM -0400, Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Adrian Hungate wrote:
> >Ok, ZPT is easier that DTML? How do you code this in ZPT?
> >
> ><dtml-in objectIds() sort=id>
> ><dtml-var sequence-item>
> ></dtml-in>
> 
> You have some good points, but there's a certain irony in the fact that 
> the above code won't work.  You either forgot to quote the "objectIds()" 
> expression, or it shouldn't have parentheses, illustrating the first 
> ugly thing most people run into when learning DTML. :-)
> 
> Nevertheless, as you said, ZPT really does need some better way to 
> implement batching and sorting.  The need is too common to require 
> external scripts or big Python expressions to do it.
> 
> Shane

I agree with the irony and all that, and have tried several times to
switch to zpt.  I am finally almost there.  

But, I also agree with Adrian's thrust, DTML is a simple useful
language, that, ignoring the quoting problems and all the _ namespace
magic, can be picked up by anyone with an imperative language background 
in a couple of days.  (Now, the quoting problems are indeed gross).  
There is also far too much magic in DTML, especially in name lookup.

ZPT is, in fact, a much more controllable artifact.  It is also ugly,
and almost completely non-intuitive.  It seems far harder to map to
conventional languages.  In fact, I am wondering if ZPT
code may not prove to be harder to maintain, mostly because I have real
trouble finding the tal: statements while scanning the program.  In
particular, tal:repeat seems nowhere near as easy to find as <dtml-in>.
I suspect that a great deal of my problem is that ZPT is an infix or
a suffix-like notation, where DTML was a prefix notation.  I am used 
to skipping infixes to some extent, especially on first reading.  

I am going to be honest, I think I could probably do no better, given
the constraints of embedding in XML.

The biggest change for the better that I see is that it is now easy to 
use a script (Python) [still lobbying for Snake Thingie] as index_html.  

Jim Penny

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