[Zope3-dev] Scripters vs developers

[Jim Fulton]

There are a number of users I want to serve with Zope 3. They are all
important. Two of them are:

- The site developer

- The site scripter

These are very different users with very different needs, skills, and
expectations. The same choices aren't going to be right for both.

When someone starts using Zope, they will probably start as a
scripter.  They probably know how to create HTML pages.  If they are
familiar with creating dynamic pages, they may familiar with
Javascript or other page-emebded scripting technologies like ASP or
PHP.  They don't consider themselves to be developers. They don't care
to use a lot of discipline. They just want to get things done eaily
and quickly.  They like "quick and *dirty*" solutions.  The things
they build are one-off. Hopefully, we'll make it easy for them to
quickly solve problems and get lots of early success.

Developers follow a more disciplined approach to better handle the
complexity of bigger systems.  For the developer, separation of
concerns is important.  Tools for organizaing, managing and evolving
their work over time are important. The techniques they use are
necessarily a bit more involved. They are willing to more advanced
techniques to solve their more difficult problems.

If and when the needs of a scriptor go beyond what they can do with
scripting, they will have a choice:

- Learn how to to development in Zope 3. Development is more disciplined
   than scripting. The discipline is necessary to handle the increasing
   complexity of their applications.  They will need to learn some new
   concepts and techniques. We'll make this transition as clean and as
   as we can.

- They might just decide to hire a Zope developer to take them to the
   next step.

Jim

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Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
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