[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 Newsletter: Issue 10

[Paul Winkler]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 05:24:29AM -0400, Jim Fulton wrote:
> 1. Many of the people you have to clean up after would probably never have
>    gotten far enough with Zope for you to have had to clean up after them
>    if Zope 2 didn't make it so easy for them to get started. Do you think
>    that these people would have started with the CMF?  Maybe some of them
>    would have, but I think most of them wouldn't have.

Indeed. On the one hand, I've had some pain in the past year cleaning
up and redesigning a couple of portal-type sites that were initially
implemented in DTML only, largely by copying things directly out of
an earlier weblogic implementation of the same site and replacing
the jsp tags with dtml tags until it worked. YUCK! 

On the other hand, it is probably precisely
because it worked, and because they recognized its flaws, that they
hired me to be their zope expert, and thus I still have the best job
I've ever had a year later.

Now, why did they build this mess?
Because 

- They could, and it worked.

- They didn't really grasp how much they could do with CMF and skinning,
which would have been a pretty good choice except it didn't provide
a few key features out of the box and they didn't know how to add them.

- The alternative was to spend $$$$ for a commercial java-based CMS. 

Today, most of our really evil dtml gunk is long gone, and the not-evil-
but-could-be-better gunk is still chugging along happily, and most
new stuff that I've implemented uses CMF.

(But I still want to puke every time I see that one particular DTML
method that consists *entirely* of over fifty <dtml-if...>
<dtml-return..></dtml-if> blocks.  And which I translated to python 
on my second day on the job, and which promptly broke in several
ways at once, and which I decided not to touch again until
I could remove the need for it entirely, which day has been promised
for a looong time now.  Which leads to the
next point...)

> 2. They won't be able to create as much of a mess in the first place.
>    Zope 2 lets people use "scripting" techniques to create software.
>    They can create a dtml ot zpt page with lots of python in
>    it

... or none, as described above... eek!

>    and then reuse that page as a method all over their site.
>    They won't be able to do that in Zope 3. In Zope 3, templated pages
>    really can only be used for one-off pages.

This sounds OK to me.

It sounds like the mess one can easily make in zope 3 might not be
as bad as the mess one can make in zope 2. And more important, if 
refactoring is as easy as I hope, cleaning up the mess won't be bad.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com
Look! Up in the sky! It's AMBIENT WATER CAPTAIN!
(random hero from isometric.spaceninja.com)