[Zope] zope rant: It's all about delegation

Luciano Ramalho luciano@hiper.com.br
Mon, 16 Apr 2001 21:35:14 -0300


One word defines what Zope is all about: DELEGATION.

If you work alone or your project is so rocket-science that it requires
a team made 100% of highly skilled programmers, then it may be better
for you to use plain Python and Zope parts (like ZODB and ZPublihser),
Quixote, WebWare or your own framework.

Most projects in the real world are not like this. Most sites must be
managed and updated by users of varying skills. Corporate sites,
intranets, content portals must be built with tools that allow easy and
safe delegation of management powers to many people, from journalists
and salespeople to web designers with little programming skills. If you
can't delegate, you get backlogs, tech staff burn-out, frustrated users
and unhappy customers. 

An interesting point: in another "Why not Zope" piece, Chuck Esterbrook
says he prefers a syntax like the ASP and PHP <%%> tags than DTML. We
believe DTML is actually a strong selling point of Zope. Combined with
Python Scripts and SQL Methods, DTML encourages separation of layout and
logic much better than ASP and PHP. To define dynamic templates,
dtml-var, dtml-in and the occasional dtml-if are enough. With proper
support of Python Scripts, complex DTML expressions can be avoided,
making DTML very easy to read and modify by anyone who knows HTML. And
ZPT can be even easier.

In ASP and PHP it is very common to see SQL and HTML fragments embedded
in the <%%> parts, which means that DBAs, programmers and designers all
have to touch the same code to make changes. If your site is so small
that one person has all three roles, then maybe you can be more
productive hacking away SQL, HTML, PHP and client-side JavaScript all in
the same document. But if your site is that small, you really don't need
a content management system like Zope. In medium to large sites, there
are never enough all-knowing sysadmin/perl-hacker/dba/web-designer
old-style "web masters" to go around...

So Andrew Kuchling's and Chuck Esterbrook's texts should really be
called "Why Zope is not for me?" instead of just "Why not Zope?".

Best regards,

Luciano