pcplantdb

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

Aloha Chad,

Thanks for checking in.
I support you taking it easy on yourself in terms of product and process 
and what you perceive having done so far vs. your expectations.

> In terms of the project, developing in Zope is not at all what I
> thought it would be.  I am very dissapointed in HG in terms of
> progress and product, because developing on the level that HG needs to
> interwork with Zope is much harder than I expected.

My assumption had been that HG would in fact be developed as a zope 
product (albeit a complex and sophisticated one).  When you posted about 
some of the tech details of your work thus far, my best guess was that 
you were in fact working on it from some other basis, writing a lot of 
stuff 'from scratch' and then trying to integrate it with what zope 
already provides.  I can imagine that would be pretty complicated, at 
the least.

Let me know if that difference makes sense to you, and how you were 
actually going at it vs. my guess above.

> On a personal level I'm going through a lot as well.  I'm currently in
> process of leaving Dancing Rabbit (Nov 1st) and trying to start a
> small family sized income sharing community as well as a larger
> permaculture focuses land trust.

Whew, big job - and good for you, and best wishes.

  There are a number of low level
> tensions between me and DR members mostly around a feeling that my
> current direction is 'competition' for DR

Sounds like they've got some issues there... :-/
Remember, it's not about you.

> and that I don't really
> respect the choices and direction of DR.

Well, perhaps you don't - there's nothing 'wrong' with that (though they 
may put that on you anyway...).  If they're not what you want you 
deserve to go create what you do want.

> I would like to submit the 33
> hours I have for payment for work up to the latest release.

I support that.

 >   o Keep developing HG in Zope as planned.  This is a doable option
>     although I'm currently not very excited about it.  I also am no
>     longer sure that developing in Zope will be in anyway better or
>     faster than alternate methods.

Per my comments above, what about looking at *how* you're developing 
in/with zope?  Check and see if you're trying to do more yourself than 
might be necessary.

>   o Develop from Eden.  Look into ORMs and/or take a week off to write
>     one.  In my current frame of mind this sounds like what I would
>     like to do, although it means we wasted 33 hours or about 5% of
>     our current funding.

Not wasted - learning curve, 'mistakes' to harvest and so on.  I am 
willing to bet you learned quite a bit that will be useful doing what 
you've already done.

>   o Do something even more radical like just use Medusa (ZServer) and
>     ZODB together getting rid of all the Zope cruft.  Part of the
>     reason I was so sold on Zope is that I really liked the
>     development of ack! in ZODB.  It might be interesting to integrate
>     ZODB with Twisted <twistedmatrix.com>.

That would be more radical than writing an ORM yourself?!?  I guess it's 
al relative to what one already knows... ;-)
Speaking of which, Zope3 is maturing fast - how's the ORM/ORB there look 
to you?

I support you looking at your above options, and any others that occur 
to you or we suggest in the near future, and let yourself know where you 
want to go with development that would be fun again.

aloha,
John S.


--

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