[Zope3-dev] New Software Space UI

[Jim Fulton]

Stephan Richter wrote:
> Hello everyone,
> 
> as you might know, I am in the process of completing the Component 
> Architecture simplification work by removing the concept of services as well 
> as the view API (though views were converted to adapters already). Also, the 
> concept of a site manager will become a much more central concept as it holds 
> both, the adapter and utility registry, and provides basically the local 
> Component Architecture API.
> 
> Once I am done with the Python work, the Web UI will need some major 
> refactoring as well. However, I am not good with UIs or more specifically, I 
> really do not know what users expect from it. Thus I wanted to ask you guys 
> how you would like the UI to behave from a functional point of view. Maybe 
> answering the following questions might help:
> 
> 1. What do you like about the current way of configuring components through 
> the Web UI?
> 
> 2. What do you *not* like in the current UI?
> 
> 3. Is the "Tools" tab helpful? How could it be improved or should it be 
> removed?
> 
> 4. What tasks do you most frequently complete in Software Configuration space?

I think it would be more useful to ask more basic questions.  I think the
current UI is mostly a failure and should not be used as a baseline.

I better questions are questions like:

- What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure utilities
   through the web?

- What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure adapters
   through the web?

- What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure views
   through the web?  This is a little bit different than adapters because of the
   use of templates.

Two partial sucesses in the current UI, IMO, are:

- Through-the-web modules.  These are currently broken for largely
   shallow reasons. I think, however, that the concept that through-the-web
   Python code should be managed as modules is sound.

- Page folders allow designers to work on templates without having to
   do configuration themselves. Basically, a page folder is configured
   once with a default configuration and any templates added to it
   get that configuration.

Finally, it's worth reviwing the goals for through-the-web configuration
and development:

- Through-the-web configuration is convenient in some ways.  It lets people
   configure their site without resorting to ZCML.  If done well, this is a big
   win. (It is currently done so badly that it makes ZCML look easy to use. ;)

- Through-the-web configuration is currently necessary for components that
   store state in ZODB.  We will find some way around this in the future.

- Through-the-web prototyping, if done well, could be very convenient.  It allows
   things to be tried out quickly without restarting and without resorting to
   brittle/partial reload schemes.  My vision is that, after initially prototyping
   something TTW, it will be possible to automatically generate a file-system
   based package from the prototype.

Jim

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Jim Fulton           mailto:jim at zope.com       Python Powered!
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