[ZPT] Formatting strings and more motivation needed

Brent M Hendricks brent@valinor.waldenweb.com
Wed, 9 May 2001 10:15:20 -0500


On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 10:10:14AM +0200, Peter Bengtsson wrote:
> So, still no more reasons other than use of GoLive and tidy namespace calls?
> Don't get me wrong. I really really appreciate ZPT and all your effort in
> it. My company is likely to start to use it because we DO have design nerds
> who use GoLive or Dreamweaver or something. It's great for us! But at the
> moment only I know (a bit at least) ZPTs and now people who are getting to
> understand DTML have to learn one more thing.
> 
> ZPT people! Do you feel that working with Page Templates is
> easier/better/more convenient than working with DTML *?

For people who know DTML, I can see that ZPT might look like too much
extra work for little (perceived) benefit.  But I think the ability to
use standard HTML editing tools is going to be a huge selling point
for winning new zope customers.

There's a second, more subtle point though.  ZPT allows (I would say
*encourages*) good separation of presentation logic from business
logic.  If you find yourself thinking that your ZPT is getting too
complex and unwieldy, it probably is!  This may be an indication that
you need to offload some of that logic into a script, where it
belongs.  DTML, I think, made it too easy to put complicated back-end
logic in the frontend.

My $.02

--Brent

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