[Zope-dev] Fwd: Defining Zope 3.

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey Patrick,

Patrick Gerken wrote:
[snip]
> I did not check wikipedia, nor did I skim the last three years of
> mailing list traffic, I wonder, did I not do enough thoroughly
> research in 2008?

I think the strong impression was given that Zope 3 was going to be the 
new bright future and that Zope 2 was going to be replaced by Zope 3, 
one way or the other. It doesn't matter what exactly was said, the 
impression was given.

The path that this took has evolved over time. The original ideas about 
Zope 3 being able to run Zope 2 code, perhaps with a migration script, 
never went anywhere. But along another path in some ways we are already 
in that future, as Zope 2 apps use a large amount of Zope 3 approaches 
and code.

One thing that happened recently is that we extracted the concept of the 
Zope Toolkit from Zope 3. We'd now say that Zope 2 uses the Zope 
Toolkit. It could use more of the toolkit, it could use the toolkit 
better, and the toolkit itself is imperfect, but it's going forward, and 
that's good.

[snip]
> I disregarded the business decisions these companies made with the way
> they did Zope development and considered it inferior. But these
> companies have based their development model on this. They allow
> customers who do customizations in code, and depend on Zope, to take
> care that their customers cant break their system. This is their competitive
> advantage that they cant afford to loose.
> 
> That is a different culture and mind than the ones who do typical
> Zope3 development. 

Yes, I think that this is an important realization; that development 
using the ZMI, while flawed in many ways, is also *superior* in other
ways to the development model that Zope 3 (and the Zope Toolkit) use.

I talked a bit about that here:

http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2008/09/19/0

One response to this is to try to make the development model of the Zope 
Toolkit less challenging for developers. That's Grok. Another response 
is to make there simply less code to worry about when developing; that's 
BFG. Hopefully we'll manage to continue to evolve the Toolkit in the 
direction of increased simplicity too.

But there are other responses. One is to reconsider through the web 
development patterns and see how they might be supported in the context 
of the Zope Toolkit. I have some ideas...

> For the Zope3 developer, the only ones who program
> are the programmers and keeping the code in file system and
> unrestricted is much much better because you have all the development
> tools at hand to have higher productivity and safety. Think versioning
> system and easy search and replace over multiple files.

> With this in mind, Zope2 and Zope3 are totally different things.
> People who use Zope2 and want to continue using it have different
> goals than the Zope3 developers. I think, both have the right to have
> their own communities. A different name would help separating these
> communities. People who do both Zope2 and Zope3 stuff would just be in
> two communities.

I think it's valuable for those communities to share code and 
approaches, but yes, I think a different name (for either Zope 2 or Zope 
3, where Zope 3 would be the road of least resistance) would help make 
clear the vast differences between Zope 2 and Zope 3. There are a large 
number of overlaps too, but fundamentally the Zope 2 TTW web development 
model is quite different.

[snip]
> I think now grok is not so much
> on top of Zope3, and maybe I should have taken a deeper look into
> that. 

In the past, when Zope 3 meant both "Zope Toolkit" and "Zope 3 the thing 
you install and start developing with", Grok was on top of Zope 3 in 
part. Now we simply state that Grok is built on top of the Zope Toolkit. 
It mostly adds an alternative configuration mechanism to the Zope 
Toolkit (through Martian), and tries to make it easier to hook up 
applications this way.

> But how shall somebody, who does not wade through the mailing
> lists, make an informed decision? 

No. This is why I think good information on the web and a consistent 
message are both important. We're not there yet for both. I think we 
need a home page that says: want to get started with Zope? Here are the 
options. That is being worked on.

> If the Zope3 App Server with its zmi
> is becoming more of an implementation to show whats possible with the
> ZTK, why should it be called Zope3?

I don't think it's to show what's possible. I think it is a development 
platform that pre-integrates the Zope Toolkit and adds a bit 
(documentation, installation methods, a user community).

> People start to get annoyed of this discussion, since some started to
> say bad words. I for one am happy about this discussion, because I
> hope that It might result in a better common understanding and after
> that a better public statement, whats happening, what frameworks are
> around and which have what advantages and disadvantages.

Me too!

> Also, I want be be in the Zope foundation, so that Lennart makes me
> drunk too. I heard he favors whisky. That's fine.

:)

You're very welcome to join! I'd be happy to nominate you as a member.

http://foundation.zope.org/members/join

Thank you Patrick for your thoughts. I think it would do people good to 
read thoughts like this more often on this mailing list, so I hope 
you'll continue to contribute.

Regards,

Martijn