[Zope3-dev] Where's the API?

[Stephan Richter]

On Friday 08 August 2003 15:32, Chris Gray wrote:
> I've done some playing around with Zope3 (latest from CVS) and I find the
> equivalent of the Zope2 API very sparse.  I mean in particular the methods
> and attributes of content objects that are exposed to the TAL and DTML. As
> far as I can tell I can't directly grab a page's name, title, size,
> modification time, object type, url, or metadata.  The only attribute I
> can seem to get is content_type.

There has not been much work on the TTW development experience. We have mainly 
concentrated on providing a solid foundation for Python developers, making 
the development of new Python extensions as pleasant as possible. And I think 
in this area we have succeeded in many ways. 

I think once the first beta is out, we will take much more care about the Web 
development end. But we still have not made many decisions in this area. We 
still need to discover how we want to address the various audiences, suhc as 
the component developer, site/content manager and the end user. Therefore we 
have not put much effort into exposing the API. 

However, we have implemented all the necessary hooks to make it easy to write 
access to the API. In ZPT this is done using namespaces like:

<span tal:content="context/dc:title" />
or 
<span tal:content="context/zapi:title_or_id" /> (or something like that)

What does all of this mean? Zope 3 is just not ready for the TTW developer at 
this point. However, you should feel free to start a Wiki collecting 
requirements for this target audience. Such a document would make our lives 
much simpler, once we start to look more carefully at TTW development.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training