[Zope] FYI: Python product tutorial updated

[Darcy Clark]

Brian,

thanks for the reply ... I am currently more hopeful and feeling a little
better about the amount of time and effort that I have put into Zope;
knowing that the Zope book is coming also helps a lot. As someone else on
the list replied, the obscurity problem will be partially solved with the
book and others that will hopefully follow. I am in particular looking
forward to some case studies that show how to use *and* why you should use
some of the more complex Zope functionality.

After being immersed in Zope for so long (about a year), I decided it was
time to take a survey of the other tools out there - after doing a quick
survey, I came away still unimpressed with most of them. I still think Zope
requires more conceptual understanding (Zen?) that the other tools, but I'm
still convinced that these concepts, many of which I am still yet to fully
understand, offer far deeper and more elegant solutions to web development
problems than the majority of the other tools.

It's going to be tricky to achieve "optional complexity" - but that is
exactly the nature of Zope. There are several levels or layers of Zen -
after reaching each layer new potential ways to solve problems become
possible. For instance, I know enough DTML and SQL to implement most of the
functionality that I need and I have been writing my own ZClasses also. But
I don't yet fully grasp the full possibilities of the Catalog, and
Python/External Methods and I have had no luck getting any of the
alternative User/Membership systems to work for me. These latter
concepts/tools constitute my next level of complexity.

Anyway, that's just my 2 cents .... 

Darcy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brian Lloyd [mailto:brian@digicool.com]
> Sent: Monday, October 02, 2000 11:23 AM
> To: Darcy Clark; zope@zope.org
> Subject: RE: [Zope] FYI: Python product tutorial updated
> 
> 
> > This tutorial looks great...it explained a lot of things to me 
> > that I wasn't
> > able to put together before.
> > 
> > But...on looking at it, a nagging thought keep recurring...this 
> > is a really
> > quite long and complicated process for a Poll product. As 
> much as I like
> > Zope and thing it is a great platform on which to develop web 
> > applications,
> > I often wonder about the complexity and obscurity of some of the 
> > procedures
> > that need to executed while making what are, on the face of it, 
> > often quite
> > simple web objects or applications. Consequently I have honestly 
> > had quite a
> > hard time convincing PHP-savvy colleagues that the path to 
> Zope Zen is
> > something worth starting on. Does anyone else experience 
> these nagging
> > doubtful thoughts occasionally ?
> 
> I think yours is a valid criticism. Zope provides the 
> infrastructure to do a lot of powerful and complex things, 
> with the downside that (currently) as a developer a lot of 
> the details are "in your face". One major goal I have for 
> Zope going forward is to strive for "optional complexity" - 
> not only for day-to-day use of Zope but also for component 
> developers.
> 
> I'd be very interested to hear any ideas you folks have 
> on ways to help "make simple things simple" for development 
> and to allow people to deal with complexity only as they 
> begin to need it...
> 
> 
> Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
> Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
> Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com 
> 
> 
>