[Grok-dev] Re: Admin UI name change suggestion

Martijn Faassen faassen at startifact.com
Mon Oct 8 14:07:56 EDT 2007


Hey,

Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> Martijn Faassen wrote:
>>>> It depends on what you mean by "getting started", right? It's less 
>>>> work to get a single application installed.
>>>
>>> Please convince me that this *isn't* what 99% of the people starting 
>>> with Grok want and I'll be happy to reconsider my view :).
>>
>> Many beginners will probably expect the application to be installed. 
>> Others probably won't be surprised that it needs to be installed 
>> first. I agree though that grokproject could pre-install an application.
> 
> That seems to suggest you want to do it in buildout. I find that the 
> wrong place, still. I think it should be done during application startup.

No, as I tried to express before, it should be done at any point before 
the application starts up. Whatever is best, and you're better able to 
judge this than I am. Application startup is fine with me. :)

[snip]
>> The UI should definitely help if this makes this visible. The current 
>> trunk shows broken applications in a different area explictily marked 
>> as broken objects. It didn't used to do this, but we ran into this in 
>> the grok tutorial I gave in august and Uli fixed this.
> 
> It might also be nice if we could mark outdated application objects 
> somehow. People will add a local_utility definition or a grok.Indexes 
> definition without realizing that they have to recreate the application.

Yes. This will be an interesting task to implement. In fact I think 
eventually we'll get a nice library out of the dev UI project to ask 
things like "give me the views for this object in all known skins" and 
so on. I think asking a question like "are all utilities installed that 
could be installed" would be a good one there too. I think though it 
needs some extra guidance from the code that it won't get now though.

Besides this we need a 'install all local utilities and indexes needed' 
button.

[snip]
> Noob:    Why do I have to instantiate the application? Doesn't Grok just
>          find it?
> 
> Philipp: Yes, it finds it. But you need to create a persistent instance
>          of it, so that your views are found. You see, Zope has this
>          model where it traverses objects to get your views, etc. etc.
> 
> ... and I was right in that place where I was explaining object publishing.

Okay, understood.

Do you think you could skip this explanation if the application was there?

I think you could've gotten away with just saying "there could be 
multiple applications and you need to pick the one" or something like 
that, right, instead of publishing it. From your explanation, I think 
actually the ZODB storage aspect is more surprising than the publishing 
aspect here - in other frameworks there's no need to instantiate 
anything as there's nothing really stored persistently besides the RDB. 
What makes Grok most difficult is that it stores.

[snip]
> I think we have an agreement then.

Yay! :)

Regards,

Martijn




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