pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Wow, there is a lot to Zope and I get the feeling I've just scratched
the surface.  Fortunately the documentation seems pretty good.

I've spent most of time looking at zope 3 (X3 beta 1).  I was trying
to get a feel for where the product is headed by looking at the
cutting edge.  I'm not sure it's ready for our use but I like the
direction it's headed using some post-OO ideas like components and
adapters (I especially like the adpater ideas).  Anyway some the
reasons Z3 is headed the way it is is because of issues with Z2.  From 
<http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/VisionStatement/>:

  You can't learn Zope development in bite sized chunks; you must
  learn the entire framework at once. It's hard to use familiar tools
  and techniques.  It's hard to reuse code. The Zope development model
  (ie Products) often seem too heavy-weight. Zope products don't offer
  a good separation between logic and content.

The api is big and complex, something good to know going in.  The
learning curve may be a bit more than I expected.  On the other side
zope will probably do more than I expected.

Another interesting read I found was
<http://toulouse.amber.org/archives/2003/04/14/comparing_zwiki_code_bases.html>.
Skip the first three paragraphs, but techies should be sure to check
out the code comparison pages.  Zwiki for zope 2 is pretty horrible
with multiple inheritance of 10 superclasses, etc.  Hmmm... object
abuse. 

Anyway, if you get a chance to talk to your geeks John ask them what
they think about Zope 3.  Like I said I'm not even at the point of
knowing whether to consider it as a possible platform but it's pretty
exciting stuff.

Bed time, more study later.

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'