[Zope3-dev] Products: Contents View Tab?

[Stephan Richter]

On Wednesday 28 April 2004 12:11, Ian Beatty wrote:
> No, not "magic", just complex and quite different from Zope 2. I've sat
> through graduate-level physics lectures that were very explicit --
> everything was precisely defined -- but the whole, and the implications of
> the various statements, still took a lot of time to grasp.

In many respects a good software framework is equivalent to physics theories 
(like Quantum Field Theory or Superconductor Theory). They both concentrate 
on modeling the real world in one respect or another; that's the reason I 
like both, physics and application engineering.

That holds true for Zope 3 as well. I personally think that physical theories 
are often extremely complex and much less transparent or explicit than 
application APIs -- see Jackson for example; I feel so stupid every time I 
look at this stuff. I guess it depends with which you have more practice.

Also notice that most physical theories are around for a much longer time, so 
that many people worked on presenting them and writing books. For younger 
theories, like Quantum Computing, there is much less material and everyone 
just copies each other. The only good and comprehensive text is by Nielsen 
and Chuang, which sucks if you look at the details -- I know that for sure, 
since I just taught several sections from the book this semester. Well, back 
to Zope 3. I think that Zope 3 documentation is at the same point here. Not 
many people have taken a stab at documentation yet, because not many people 
use it yet and it is still changing too much.

> I hope it's not too long before Z3 stabilizes enough for some thorough
> references to be written -- for example, definitive documentation of the
> legal tags and attributes in zcml and their purposes. In Java work, I
> absolutely depend on JavaDocs.

Here is the deal concerning documentation: Once the beta is released in May 
(yes, we are trying very hard to meet this deadline), I will start revising 
the developers book and polish it to make it ready for publication. I expect 
to have a well-working copy by end of June or July. Until then, there is also 
the API doc tool that Eckard mentioned. It is always up-to-date, since it 
grabs its information directly from the configuration and code. It was 
designed to be a little bit like the Java Docs, but I think it is much more 
powerful, since anything you can imagine is interlinked. I went thru great 
pains to extract all the information possible from the code. If you find 
anything missing, please let me know!

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training