[Zope] RE: Zope musings
Alan Johnston
adjohnston@worldnet.att.net
Wed, 17 Feb 1999 16:15:44 -0500
Paul,
First of all, your honesty is very much appreciated, though I think your
"5" rating with aspirations for "25" are way too stingy in rating Zope's
current IDE model. The very fact that anyone, anywhere with a browser can
securely access any document in the web site, with complete Undo
functionality ... heck, you're already in 40s or 50s, even if you DO have
to type angle brackets and tags into a <textarea>.
Now the problem is how to make that functionality accessible to people who
want (or must have) WYSIWYG to produce HTML. My initial attempts to use
Netscape Composer did not work to my satisfaction. No matter how I tried
to set Composer's Publishing properties...Maintain Links, Keep Images With
Pages, et al...it (Composer, I guess, though maybe Zope?) would invariably
change certain link strings during the PUT operation, such that pointers to
images and other resources would be lost. Second, if there was a problem
during the PUT, a very brief (less than a second) error screen would appear
and I could not find a way to keep the page up long enough to read what it
said.
Anyway, I was just starting a Cold Fusion project when we were doing
initial Zope testing, so I didn't have any time to futz with Principia and
really try to find solutions. Certainly by comparison, CF Studio rates an
80 or 90 and does provide Remote Development Services (and FTP), plus
direct access to ODBC data sources on the remote server, nice drag-and-drop
insertion of table fields, pretty tag decoration, tag completion, and lots
of other good stuff, blah blah blah. The bad news: all that comes at a
cost of several grand, and still does NOT provide universal, secure access
to anyone with a browser, nor the server-side flexibility of developing our
own callable routines in a non-proprietary language (Python). (CF allows
you to develop your own custom tags, of course, but learning and using that
functionality would tie you even more tightly to Allaire's future revenue
stream.)
Anyway, I'm rambling. We're definitly looking for reasons to give Zope an
unqualified 'yes' as you put it. So I'm glad to hear that you're working
on the IDE problem and look forward to hearing more about those efforts.
Alan Johnston
At 02:26 PM 2/17/1999 -0500, you wrote:
>
>Tom Jenkins writes:
>> Hi folks,
>> We're in the process of evaluating Zope and Cold Fusion. I'm the
>> resident Open Source advocate <g>, so I'd like to make sure that Zope
>> has all its benefits given its due.
>>
>> We're, (well actually Alan is), working on a contract where
>> the client
>> requested Cold Fusion so he has some direct experience. We installed
>> Principia back in December and actually are testing it for
>> another client,
>> but haven't spent much time with it unfortunately.
>>
>> Alan has brought up some usage concerns of his and I hope someone
>> on the list could respond. Please don't think that Alan is
>> against the
>> product; no in fact he is very interested in it but is just
>> unsure of the
>> tools available to help do good work.
>
>Understood. And thanks for sharing the points with the community.
>
>> ------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
>> Date sent: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:08:00 -0500
>> To: TomJenkins@zentuit.com
>> From: Alan Johnston <flames direct to me, please [g]>
>> Subject: Zope musings
>>
>> I don't know why I didn't think of this before. As you can tell from
>> earlier comments, I like Cold Fusion studio, the IDE which
>> allows you to
>> control web page, database, query, and site management all in
>> one window.
>> It is a very slick way to create web pages in general,
>> whether or not they
>> include CF tags and CF queries.
>
>Tis true. On the other hand, only developers can use CF Studio, unless
>you plan to plop down several thousand dollars, ship it to you
>customers, and then train them on it.
>
>Put another way: what if someone outside the company wanted to change a
>ColdFusion page? What would be their IDE?
>
>> But there's no reason you couldn't also use CF Studio to
>> develop Zope/DTML
>> pages. You would have to save your pages on a local drive
>> and use Zope's
>
>Don't suppose CF supports any standards, like saving to an FTP site or
>publishing using HTTP PUT? (Note that Zope's FTP support should be
>solid within a month.)
>
>> Upload feature to publish them. But that's a fairly small price in
>> inconvenience. Anyway, the lack of a nice, user-friendly
>> interface for web
>> page creation is the one klunky thing about Zope (Principia)
>> at our site.
>
>I certainly agree. We have spent a lot of time over the last month
>thinking about an IDE. The direction that we are going is:
>
>o choose an IDE strategy that reinforces Open Source, rather than
>attempt to annoint a proprietary tool like CF Studio
>
>o base the IDE strategy on advanced standards (HTML4, CSS2, DOM, XML,
>RDF, and WebDAV)
>
>It appears that I'll have more to say on this in about a month. Other
>efforts, such as integrating PythonWorks from Pythonware, are feasible
>as well.
>
>> Typing angle brackets and obscure HTML tags into your browser
>> is a fun way
>> to astound and impress your non-HTML-literate friends, but I
>> wouldn't have
>> wanted to make a Georgetown/CASS questionnaire system that way. And,
>> again, trying to use Netscape Composer, as recommended in the
>> Principia
>> docs is a sub-par solution. So this is really the one
>> (only?) area I've
>> seen so far where CF is way ahead Zope.
>
>If someone has Linux on their desktop, how do they manage CF sites?
>
>Let me ask a question that tries to quantify the situation. IMO, the
>current Zope IDE is pretty unproductive. On a scale of 1 to 100, its
>*productivity* level is about a 5 compared to NetObjects Fusion,
>Dreamweaver, etc. On other factors it shines -- it is based on
>standards, is completely portable, source code is available, is
>mind-numbingly easy to modify the IDE, etc.
>
>Just for argument, let's say that CF Studio is a 90. If we came out
>with an improved IDE that retained the factors listed above that CF
>Studio fails at, what number would it need to move up to for you to give
>an unqualified "Yes!" ??
>
>> So if we want to use Zope for real-world tasks, one important
>> need in the
>> near term is to find a better way to do actual web page/HTML
>
>If *we* is your shop, how about...XEmacs? Using ZServer to publish your
>object system by HTTP, you can be *significantly* more productive:
>
>o fantastic editor that now runs deliciously on Windows
>
>o bulk copy from/to the local machine
>
>o all the ediff capabilities you could dream up
>
>o html-mode, etc.
>
>o using W3 in XEmacs, access to things like setting properties and undo
>
>It would still be missing a *whole* lot of things vs. CF Studio, such as
>link checkers, a list of variables that can be inserted, syntax
>colorization of the markup, etc. Let's say it moved up to a 25.
>
>--Paul
>
>Paul Everitt Digital Creations
>paul@digicool.com 540.371.6909
>
>_______________________________________________
>Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org
>http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope
>
>
Alan Johnston
DevIS (Development InfoStructure)
adjohnston@worldnet.att.net
919-844-4124