[Zope3-dev] Zope 3 Newsletter: Issue 10

[Jeffrey P Shell]

On Sunday, September 7, 2003, at 06:27  AM, Stephan Richter wrote:

> On Sunday 07 September 2003 00:23, Andreas Jung wrote:
>> I agree mostly with Chris and Jeffrey. For years we preached the 
>> separation
>> of presentation
>> and logic....and now going back the PHP age? NO! The approach of 
>> working
>> with templates and
>> skin methods worked very fine in the past in our company and I don't 
>> see
>> why a programmer should
>> see this code in templates and why a designer should see unreleated 
>> code in
>> a template.
>
> You make a false assumption here. The script support is **not** for
> programmers, but for **scripters**. We do not want to go back to the 
> PHP, but
> yet we have to ask ourselves why PHP is so successful. We have thought 
> about
> this a bit and noticed that sometimes quick and dirty is what you want 
> to do
> or the only thing someone starting with programming knows how to do.

Perl is successful also.  I don't see Python tripping over itself to 
have first class regex objects, braces, or $_.

If you look at the JSP and ASP.NET world, the pattern is to move away 
from the 'script embedded in a page' syndrome.  (ASP.NET puts code in 
the physical page file, but their development tools split how you edit 
them).

> This support is not meant for the serious application developer. For 
> scripters
> code duplication is not as much of an issue or will not occur, since 
> they
> simply do not know how to do it better.  But getting **something** 
> working is
> much better than getting nothing working and learning more theory. Most
> people learn by example (that certainly includes me), so allowing them 
> to get
> something up and going is much better than doing it the right way.
>
> One of the goals in Zope 3 is to provide a gradual learning curve from 
> a
> scripter to a real developer. I expect myself to write an article 
> about that
> soon as we have several necessary components in place for this 
> already. ;-)
>
>> Keep the good concepts of Zope 2 and kick the worse crap.
>
> We do, but one of the flaws in Zope 2 is that it provides no entry 
> point to
> the scripter.

Except for Python Scripts.  This entry point here could be smoothed 
over with a good "How to do scripting in Zope" document.  Most 
'scripters' are hopefully smart enough to latch on to the concept.

At the last Linux World Expo, people really seemed to be interested in 
the separation idea.  No one really came up to me and said "You know, I 
wish Zope were more like PHP"

There were a few people who came up complaining about the learning 
curve however.

There were also a lot of happy users who came up as well.