[Zope-ZEO] Advice

[Ken Manheimer]

On Mon, 25 Sep 2000, Andrew Kuchling wrote:

> On Mon, Sep 25, 2000 at 10:03:19AM -0400, Greg Ward wrote:
> >This strikes me as a good pithy summary of the problem.  We were trying
> >to write *code*, dammit, and a database-of-code-objects is not an
> >adequate substitute for a real programming environment.
> 
> Actually, it could be an adequate substitute with a lot of work;
> consider Smalltalk, where you modify the set of objects in a workspace
> and just distribute the workspace.  I have an impression of Lisp
> Machine environments worked similarly to some degree.  But that means
> you have to commit to building an editor and version control and
> testing framework within your environment, which is a lot of work.  

However, there may be solutions that offer the best of both worlds.  Paul
sketched one, based on the prospective WebDAV version control mechanisms.  
This would capitalize on the work of others, and also afford
synchronization with filesystems (given WebDAV clients for the
filesystem).

In the meanwhile, i think chris is trying to say that you can do some or
all of your product development in the filesystem, and get the features
you seem to be demanding.  There are some specific contexts - particularly
presentation - where ZClass/TTW products gain you enough to be worth the
pain of, eg, using mouse cut and paste to edit as files, and paste into
the product, but you don't use them if it's not worth it to you!

(I don't sympathize with whining about editing in a textarea, because that
is so patently untenable as far as i'm concerned that i immediately found
a fairly convenient way to work around it - mostly using keystrokes, for
that matter.  And my keyboard is a trackpoint, so even moving to the
textarea to select it is a lot like keystrokes.  But that's a small
detail, important only to hands-on-the keyboard fanatics like me...-)

A WebDAV-based sort of solution isn't going to happen immediately, and in
any case it's not entirely clear to me exactly what requirements drove you
to do quixote.  Is there somewhere i should look for that?  I'm asking not
only out of curiousity - i'm interested in related issues for, eg,
releasing development code to production servers, and so forth, and would
like to collect requirements, maybe just informally, to see how to improve
some of the ad-hoc things my team is already doing...

Ken
klm@digicool.com