[Zope3-dev] Schema & Vocabulary Fields

[Roché Compaan]

* Gary Poster <gary at zope.com> [2003-09-10 19:41]:
> 
> 
> Roché Compaan wrote:
> 
> >If you point me to the Zope 2 code and I can have a go at it.
> 
> I'm afraid Fred's right: that's part of one of our products.  I'll help 
> if I can, though, if you have specific questions.  If you want to pursue 
> that, we probably ought to take it off-list.

Thanks for the offer - I will definitely take you up on it ;-) We
actually have an elaborate forms framework built on top of Formulator
and Zope2 and I am doing a side by side comparison between that and
Zope3's forms framework to see what is there and what is missing - maybe
there are other ideas that we can contribute.

> >Sure :-) I've been watching the schema and widgets framework for a long
> >time now but haven't actually sat down to write code based on it. At the
> >moment I am investigating how and if our Zope2 products will live on in
> >Zope3. I must say that I am very impressed with the forms framework from
> >what I've seen so far, so well done to everybody that contributed to it.
> 
> :-)  Yes, it is pretty cool.

Which makes it very difficult not to start using Zope3 for production
apps. Each weekend when I have time to investigate the latest
development in Zope I end up in this frustrating loop: First I look at
Zope3's schema and forms and my mouth waters. Then I wonder if we
shouldn't port schema and forms to Zope2 for our current development.
But port to which Zope version? Zope 2.6 with python2.1 or 2.7 with
python2.2 and new style classes and yummy descriptors. Oh, and what
about Plone, they seem to have put a lot of effort into Archetypes. No,
that implementation is a bit convoluted and tries to stuff everything
from widgets to storage concerns in the schema. And this goes on and on.
I end up doing the sane thing and strengthen our existing framework and
I also regret this in some way because we could have contributed our
effort to Zope3.

This is the most frustrating time to be a Zope developer on the one hand
and very exciting on the other. We have major contributions to make to
Zope development - Associations, Forms, MonkeyStorage (another ZODB
storage) but it is difficult to target a version. Although it may be
logical to target Zope3 it doesn't help us if we can't use it in
production. But we're patient ...


-- 
Roché Compaan
Upfront Systems                 http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za