[Zope3-dev] Re: views/foo versus context/@@foo

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Martijn Faassen wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> Currently in Zope 3 in its page templating engine there is a 'views' 
> name defined that can be used to access a particular view in TALES, like 
> this:
> 
> views/foo
> 
> or
> 
> python:views['foo']
> 
> I heard that this is deprecated in favor of:
> 
> context/@@foo
> 
> or presumably in Python, something like:
> 
> python:path('context/@@foo')
> 
> I have a few comments to make.
> 
> A cursory grepping of the Zope 3 codebase saw a lot of instances where 
> instead of:
> 
> context/@@foo
> 
> we see
> 
> context/foo

I'm actually surprised that this works and to be honest, I'm not too 
happy about it.

The 'views' namespace is somewhat magic in a way that you don't know for 
what view is gotten? For context? For zope.interface.Interface? You 
wouldn't know. That's why the context/@@foo notation is always 
preferable because it makes it quite clear for what object you get the view.

So, I think we should once and for all deprecate 'views' (not just in 
our telling people, but in the code!) and hunt down the places where the 
'@@' is left out. Furthermore, we should make the context/foo magic 
disappear (or at least generate deprecation warnings), so that in the 
future, only context/@@foo is possible for views.

$ python -c "import this" | grep implicit
Explicit is better than implicit.

Philipp