[Zope] Re: Java re-invents DTML :-)

Terry Hancock hancock@anansispaceworks.com
Mon, 17 Feb 2003 19:06:54 -0800


On Monday 17 February 2003 09:01 am, Chris Withers wrote:
> Kevin Carlson wrote:
> > Come on folks.  There's nothing wrong with supporting two templating 
> > languages.  Quite honestly, dtml is much easier to learn for most and 
> > has it's place in application development

DTML has worked pretty much flawlessly for me. I have *NEVER* encountered any 
of the bugaboos about obfuscation or excessive code in it that have been 
claimed to be its faults. I use it in an admittedly complex presentation 
layer, and it provides excellent support for everything I need to do there. 
Python does the heavy lifting just fine, and I see no reason to change this 
part of my design.

> ...not unless some of its major current flaws are corrected. I think this 
is 
> possible but I don't see the point of having two templating languages for 
one 
> app server especially as we're now getting to the stage where you need to 
know 
> _both_ before you can do anything useful with Zope :-(

Okay, I'm game, let's give ZPT the boot. It's a much more specialized 
language (HTML documents *only*), looks *really* obfuscated. Stuffs all its 
code into HTML attributes which is great for hiding the code away, but awful 
if you want to see the document structure.  DTML and Python work fine 
together, and are capable of handling the whole range of tasks I need. 
ZPT+Python cannot. 

So ZPT is neither necessary nor sufficient. 

Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com