[Zope3-dev] UI effort at Sprintathon

[Joachim Werner]

> Ever used the Mac OS X ports of Mozilla?  Gecko is nice and fast, as is
> evidenced by Chimera, but Mozilla + XUL is still slow and clunky.

What I mainly have in mind is IE 6. You can do so many things there just by
manipulating the DOM tree. Mozilla (without XUL) can probably do most of it,
too.

> We're already running into situations where Zope is feeling too
> heavyweight (mostly for serving setups) for small simple apps.
> Security and page templates and ZEO keep us coming back.  Modular
> design is good - but if I end up spending more time turning feature
> after feature after feature off than I spend coding/authoring new stuff
> for a customer, it's a loss to have chosen that technology.  I just
> don't want a stock Zope checkout/setup experience to be like that.

I guess we need an architecture that is similar to Python itself: If I need
something special, there is a library, but I just import it when I need it.
No additional overhead if I don't need the stuff ...

If I get it right, Zope 3 is going that way already. Probably we'll need
different presets (sets of preconfigured ZCL files I guess) for different
"sizes". And part of the really fancy stuff could be in the CMS package, not
in the core.

> Content Management still seems to be a very individualized thing, and I
> think the fabled in-house systems are still largely in charge, and I
> have the feeling that trend will continue for some time.  Now though,
> the in-house systems are in their second or third generation with
> consultants doing the development, but it's still personal.

Maybe things are slightly different here in Germany.

> It may be my fault for depending too much on CMFDefault at the start of
> CMF based projects.  But do you see my issue?

Yes, but the issue seems to be that the CMF is still not modular enough.
It's not the features that are the problem; the problem is that you can't
easily switch them off. This reminds me of another comparison: It's like a
RedHat or SuSE Linux distro in the early days. When you did a standard
install you got a lot of stuff you didn't need. Now they usually have
profiles to choose from, e.g. "web server without X" or "KDE Office
desktop". We could even think off using something like Debian's over-the-web
install. That would indeed be pretty cool ... (but OT for the Sprint ...)

> But I don't see the era of the custom web application as coming to an
> end.  There are just too many differences out there in data models,
> business processes, and so on.  So yes, things need to be modular, but
> there is still a lot of mileage in the custom app.

You are right. There always will be custom apps. But to be competitive (at
least in the lower segment) we need more ready-to-use stuff. If you have a
$100.000 or even $1.000.000 budget, these things might not be an issue. But
in the $10.000-20.000 segment development from scratch is too expensive. And
for many developers and small enterprises building their own platforms takes
longer than they can afford to ... It's probably just a question of what
market you are in ...

Cheers

Joachim