pcplantdb

["John Schinnerer" <john@eco-living.net>]

Aloha,

Responding to several mails here...

> There is a lot of working code out there which can actually be pretty
> helpful as examples if it is similar to what you are doing.  Looking
> at Zwiki and squishdot will probably answer most of my questions not
> included in docs.

Will work for you because you can "read" python code.  This is a good
thing for our project!!

Looking at python code that complex just makes my head hurt.  I haven't a
clue what it's doing or how or why.  Maybe some day... :-)

> So most of your concerns above should actually be directed toward the
> developers of Z3.  I was quoting them...
> I thought it was interesting to see why Jim Fulton and co's thought
> they needed to rewrite zope from ground up.  Anyway, I just wanted to
> clarify that in case you thought those where my own opinions.

Fooled me for sure... :-)

And, they have valid points about the shortcomings in Zope 2.x.

AND, Zope 2.x is still pretty darn cool and a whole different IMO better
beast than html-mungers like PHP etc. (and don't even mention ASP or .NET
please... ;-)
Like I said way back, I was just starting up the learning curve for
PHP/MySQL stuff when I found zope and I've never looked back.

> I actually don't know nearly enough about zope to have such an in depth
> criticism.

Fooled me again!  ;-)
I totally applaud the core Z3 zopistas for "doing the right thing" in
recognizing how much better yet zope could be and also that coding from
scratch is their best design option.

Regarding migration from whatever to whatever - I would favor/suggest
migration from Zope 2.x to an eventual production Zope 3.x over trying to
migrate from PHP or similar to Zope.  Especially as Zope 3.x intends to
have Zope 2.x support built in when it matures to production level.

Zope is an "alternative" to PHP only in that it is a different web
applicaiton development platform.
In terms of paradigm they are two entirely different beasts.

Using PHP/MySQL means abandoning the object-oriented and object database
advantages of python, ZODB, etc.

As for using PHP or whatever on client side:
as I recall we were going to have a nice clean API and something XML based
in between server and client.
So at that level zope would be taking in and putting out that XML based
something when communicating with a generic client (whether simple web
form or GBI or whatever).
So the client could be written in smalltalk or FORTH or Fortran or PHP or
Ada or Modula-2 or .net or whatever the heck one wanted.  As long as it
can deal with the XML-based I/O.
This doesn't negate using zope "directly" to build a front end, especially
in the beginning to get the server side stuff going.


John Schinnerer - MA, Whole Systems Design
------------------------------------------
- Eco-Living -
Whole Systems Design Services
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john@eco-living.net
http://eco-living.net