[Zope] Re: Ape

[Chris Kratz]

> Now, if using svn for source control is the only reason he was using
> APE, surely you'd agree that DirecotyViews are a more appropriate method?
>
> cheers,
>
> Chris

Yes, you are more or less correct.   The primary reason we went to APE was 
after having tried the nightmares of the various zope cvs products which just 
seemed to be able to tie themselves into knots after awhile.  APElib allowed 
us to persist all objects as plain text files on the file system so that 
normal file system tools can be used for development.  After we went to APE 
we moved from CVS to subversion.  Now most of us develop using a text editor 
directly modifying our zope objects.  We have the refresh interval dialed 
down to 1s on our dev boxes and 5-10 minutes on the live servers.  This 
allows us to easily shoehorn minor patches (fix - commit - update server) 
without any service interruption on the live server.  So, our reasons for 
using Apelib were...
 
1. Allow use of source control (branching, diffs, revision history, etc) on 
all content types as plain text files, not python pickles.
2. Allow editing of zope objects (DTML, ZPT, ZSQL, py script) externally in 
appropriate editor.
3. Allow us to quickly push out minor patches to running servers.
4. A distant final item was using TTW editing to do minor tweaks.

The only downsides we've found for apelib are that 1, it's slow and it's been 
end of lifed by it's creator.  Two of us have taken stabs at trying to make 
it so it can run in newer versions of zope, but our deep zope fu isn't up to 
the challenge (nor do we have a lot of time).  And it seems that low level 
stuff for zodb storage's change with every release (as shane noted in his eol 
announcement).

-Chris

-- 
Chris Kratz