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

[Martijn Faassen]

seb bacon wrote:
> Perhaps a better question is, how can we make it easy to refactor?

Yes, or as I put it, how can we encourage people to move into the
right direction?

It's fine if Zope 3 supports messy hacking. This is sometimes useful to
get things done. I have been advocating Zope 3 support for messy hacking.
What needs to happen though is a natural sliding scale which goes into
the right direction.

First an example of the wrong direction:

  Q hey, I made this ZPT page and I want to add this dynamic thing to it.

  A well, you can't this way, you have to learn about the component 
    architecture first, and create an interface and then register it with --

  Q -- but that's waaayyy too complicated. It's really a simple thing.

  A well, but it really pays off to learn the component architecture, an
    interface just looks like this, and you use this screen here to register
    it and then you create a persistent module to --

  Q -- huh? but it's really this simple thing! In PHP I just do this and
    it's done!

  A well, but with this interface you could do really cool stuff in the future,
    like reuse it to --

  Q -- sounds like way too much work. I just want my simple thing to work!
    This is way too complicated. Zope 3 sucks!!

  A *sighs and adds a little hack to make it easier*

  (next round, iterate, until Zope 3 is a mess)

The right direction would be this:

  Q hey, I have this ZPT and want to add this dynamic thing to it.

  A Okay, you can do that like so (which happens to be very nice and fits
    in the CA very well, but I'm not telling you).

  Q Okay, thanks! Great!

  A Oh, you can now also do [amazing thing X].

  Q Wow! Zope 3 rocks!

  (next round, iterate, until Q is a full-fledged Z3 developer)

Regards,

Martijn