[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?!

[Maik Jablonski]

Martin Kretschmar wrote:
> Maik Jablonski of the german speaking Zope Users Group
> DZUG issued a pretty bleak outlook for the future of
> Zope. What are your oppinions?

Hi to all,

I'm not able to respond to all mails in this thread due to a "trashed"
shoulder (very unlucky cyclocross-crash last week), but I'm feeling the
need to make some simple remarks.

1) Chris is right: Yes, I've had a bad day...;)

2) My initial mail wasn't intended for zope-dev. So I'm a little bit
suprised that it made it to this list. If anyone feels offended (esp. Jim),
I'm very sorry, but if I want to complain about Zope2/3 on this list, I
would use other words. The initial mail (written in german) was written in
a state of fear (not anger). The translation (and maybe my mail itself)
didn't transport my fear about the future of Zope very well I guess.

3) To say it clearly: I would have never started the "German Zope User
Group" two years ago if I were not totally convinced of Zope (the
technology & the community). Bringing up a community in Germany (with
several big conferences, etc.) was a lot of work (believe me), so I don't
feel as a usual "freerider who only complains but does not give something
back to the community". But my resources are limited as well, so I can't
take additional tasks as documentation, release-management, etc.pp... If
this means I'm not allowed to say anything critical about these points then
I'm very, very sorry making any remarks...

4) Stephan, you're right, I did not study Zope3 (and the zope3-dev-list)
very well. My initial approach to Zope3 ended with the impression: "huh,
complicated stuff, but I don't have time to work it out in the moment!"
Then I've talked to many people who said similar things about their first
experience with Zope3 (maybe I've talked to the wrong people, than this is
my fault, sorry again). So I came up with the impression: "yeah, Zope3 is
cool, but complicated (stated as 'academic' in my mail)!" (at least if you
don't have the time to work things out by diving into the source). And if
you run several mission critial applications you don't have time to look
into this kind of new stuff. But you're right, Stephan: If you want to stay
in technology business, you have to invent (read: improve by a complete
redesign) the wheel many times. So I don't think that Zope3 is useless for
the future of Zope.

5) But there's some kind of a bad impression in my mind (maybe it is without
any foundation, than all things are in best state): Zope2 isn't maintained
very well anymore due to limited ressources (bug fixes, documentation, see
mail from Andreas), but Zope3 isn't production ready at all. So if you talk
to people making the decisions in the IT-business they say: "Zope2 seems to
be a dead horse, Zope3 is just a child which learns to run... Let's settle
our business on more approved technologies like Java / Net (or even
PHP...;)). We can't wait anymore..." This kind of "frustrating" impression
made me writing the mail about the future of Zope, because I'm in love with
Zope and not Java, Net or PHP...

[[[6) Just a personal note to Stephan: You're right again about the
"quick&dirty" design of some of my products (esp. Epoz, I have simply no
knowledge about JavaScript at all (and I don't like it), but Epoz seems to
do a good job for many people until Kupu is finished). 

My job (read: strength) is custom-application-development (talking to
customers and reading their minds, developing prototypes to track down the
issues the customer meant and didn't told me and didn't dream of etc.pp.,
developing & securing & maintaing web-applications which need to work in an
environment with 20.000 students & 2000 office-workers etc.), not
"application-framework-design-nor-development", so my products are just
some "wired" by-products of my daily work. About MailBoxer: If you think
MailBoxer is just another "mailinglistmanager" (like mailman) you didn't
get the idea of it... MailBoxer is a lightweight mailinglist-framework (!,
yes I've done some kind of framework, it can be done better, but it solves
my problems this way) which is built on the power of Zope to achieve some
things you can hardly achieve with Mailman (at least I wasn't able to to).
So I've "reinvented" the wheel once more to solve some of my
application-needs...]]]

Hope this made things a little bit clearer... I didn't want to attack ZC /
Zope3-devs / the community or anyone else. I'm just fearing that we miss
the train for Zope2 AND Zope3 in the moment... if you don't think so, I'm
fine...:)

Keep zoped,

Maik