small web apps (was Re: [Zope3-dev] a simple product)

[Leonardo Rochael Almeida]

On Mon, 2003-01-20 at 15:06, Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Steve Alexander wrote:
> [...] Do you think that is a common use-case? Can you make the 
> > use-case more concrete, with an example?
> 
> I think it's very common, but I didn't recognize it when I first started 
> with Zope.  People often want to add a little more information about 
> their data, and they shouldn't have to do any programming to add 
> metadata fields. 


> [... snip nice example of photo album + searching 
>  without programming...]

I think it actually goes a bit deeper than that. I think people should
be able to create all sorts of simple DB-like web apps with Zope with as
little programming as possible. If we do this TTW thing right,
non-programmer users should be able to do everything they do with Access
and much more, because they won't be constrained by relational
normalization that an RDB imposes.

Photo albums, recipes, addressbooks with companies and contacts and
relationships between them, all of those things should, ideally, be
achievable with just clicking and form filling.

I believe we already have most of the pieces in place or underway:
Schemagen takes care of the table specification. Relationship service
deals with "links between tables". Schemagen + templates for forms. And
when the need finally comes, Python for programming instead of the
abortion that is VBA.

However, this might not be a target of Zope3 itself, but of a framework
built on top of Zope3, but it'd be very nice if Zope3 stock included it.

Cheers, Leo

-- 
Ideas don't stay in some minds very long because they don't like
solitary confinement.