[Zope3-dev] Zope 3 Newsletter: Issue 10

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On Friday, September 5, 2003, at 01:10  PM, Paul Winkler wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 09:46:52AM -0400, Gary Poster wrote:
>>   Python <script> support in TAL
>
> I'm not sure whether to be overjoyed or very afraid :-)

I'm very very afraid.

This is one of the features about Zope that I can sell over and over 
again - 'HTML is HTML and SQL is SQL and code is code is code, and 
never should they meet.'  ZPT in Zope 2 brings an insane amount of joy 
to my life.

I hope all of these things are add-ons.  And I hope they are add-ons 
which cause painful physical electrical shocks upon using :).


Zope 3 delights and terrifies me.  And adding 'script' and 'sql' 
support to page templates doesn't help me deal with my concerns about 
some of my sites and applications.  I think focus could be better spent 
on lowering the bar of entry for Zope 2 'script+template+sql method' 
developers than PHP developers.

I'm delighted because I find myself doing a lot of 
'component-architecture-style' development for Zope 2 now, and know 
that there are many places where I'm jumping through hoops to achieve 
my results.  And there are times when I actually wish I had ZCML in 
order to replace a single registration component for a single customer 
instead of having to hack it into the Python code.

But - the simple things of Zope 2, easy page templates and python 
scripts acting as glue between 'front end' pages and back end 
components seems terribly difficult.  We've already decided that a site 
like Park City Mountain Resort <http://www.pcski.com/> will just stay 
in Zope 2 land forever.  It doesn't require much in the way of dynamic 
content, most of its pages are managed by non-Zope savvy users using 
Dreamweaver (we rewrite DTML and Page Templates on the way in and out 
to make them happy in the DW environment).  I have absolutely on idea 
how such a site would work in Zope 3.  It's the kind of site where 
there is occasional dynamic bits that exist out in content space with 
some supporting Python Scripts to massage data coming into the pages, 
or to respond to a form by passing it off to a lower level component.  
If I could replace the Python Scripts that massage data with a 
persistent module, I don't even know how to address that module in 
public-space page templates in Zope 3.  The Python Scripts that respond 
to form input...well, it sounds like the Python Scripts that have been 
batted around for public-space Zope 3 will be able to handle that job 
(read form data, validate it, report errors on one page if validation 
fails, save data on success and move to next page).

Another situation is - I have an e-Commerce customer who manages his 
pages himself.  Among these pages are a couple of dynamic pages (not 
including the shopping cart) - the standard template (of course), and 
pages that list products in a category and available inventory items 
for a product.  Those two pages are backed by something that should be 
replaced with a powerful view component, because it deals with 
traversing a category tree defined in an RDBMS table (ugh) and 
pre-loading a lot of data for the category or product in question.  The 
customer sees those pages along side his pages which are basically 
static.  He can edit the dynamic ones, and generally knows how to avoid 
blowing up TAL.  He also has applied edits to the shopping 
cart/checkout pages - again, avoiding the dynamic bits while adding his 
own text and styles to other parts of the page.  He does this all in 
Dreamweaver.  I have absolutely no idea how I could give him a site 
that behaved this way in Zope 3 - are all of his fairly static pages in 
the public space along side the dynamic pages?  How do they interact 
with their traverer/loader component?  Are they all in some weird 
'++etc++' package?  How do I give him access to that via FTP?  Will all 
the pages list and look like he expects?  Do I have to tell him to put 
'@@' in all of his urls? ('@@faq.html' even though faq.html is really a 
static page?)

These are just the concerns that are mounting on my side.  Again - 
there are a lot of situations where I'm happy about what I should be 
able to do with Zope 3.  But there are a lot of places where I just 
don't know how I can do a lot of I've been doing for the past couple of 
years.  As a Zope 2 user, I hope I'm higher up on the "make happy with 
Zope 3 development" list than a PHP user.

--
Jeffrey P Shell