[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope X3 3.0.0 alpha 1 released

Terry Hancock hancock at anansispaceworks.com
Fri May 21 13:23:21 EDT 2004


On Friday 21 May 2004 01:45 am, Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> Terry Hancock wrote:
> > On Thursday 20 May 2004 08:17 am, Stephan Richter wrote:
> > 
> >>On Thursday 20 May 2004 03:54, Bogdan M. Maryniuck wrote:
> >>
> >>>But nor Z3 is so much wonderfull: 
> >>>no DTML (arrgghh!!)
> >>
> >>That tells me you have not even looked at Zope 3, since DTML is there, since 
> >>about 2 years. And I know that for a fact because I ported it.
> > 
> > 
> > That's happy news -- I'm one of those crazy people who still likes DTML, myself. ;-)
> 
> Note that DTML support in Z3 is *very* basic, though. There's no 
> infrastructure whatsoever for equipping classes with views written in 
> DTML. Even if there were, one would lack all the special traversing 
> machinery to access view and resource namespaces (e.g. for standard 
> template layout). We hope to fix this in X3.1 or so, when we introduce 
> DTML2. This will allow scripting for markup-less views, such as CSS, 
> JavaScript and the like.

I'm not sure that the structure of the namespaces was really the thing
I liked about DTML.  I mostly like the syntax of XML tags as keywords/statements.
And I like the way that DTML methods can be combined to form pagelets and
pages.

I used DTMLFile objects much more than either DTMLMethod or DTML document,
and I would like to see a more separable DTML language in Zope 3 (which
seems consistent with the overall design strategy). I think that starting
with an "ultrabasic" DTML re-implementation may make it much easier for
me to learn how DTML internally works and perhaps contribute to its
development and/or create my own derivatives that allow the namespaces
to be specified.

I really like "ZSQL" as a means of accessing the MySQL database, I find
it much more intuitive and easier to use than the built-in DB API in
Python, which seems cumbersome to me still (I feel like the whole point
of using MySQL is to write code *in SQL* not hide the SQL from the
developer, which is what DB API seems to be trying to do).  My biggest
gripe is that I can't use that technique outside of Zope -- a separable
DTML parser might make that more feasible.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this Summer, when I think I will have
much more time to tinker with this stuff.  I hope to actually contribute
something other than meandering emails sometime thereafter. I have not
forgotten the comments about working on the Interface/Schema stuff and
introspective quality control.  ;-)

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com




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