[Zope3-dev] New Software Space UI

[Stephan Richter]

On Wednesday 05 January 2005 11:11, Jim Fulton wrote:
> I better questions are questions like:
>
> - What would be a useful way to create, manage, and configure utilities
>    through the web?

I think the "Tools" tab was not too unsuccessful, but I think we can just 
merge its functionality into the standard contents view of a site management 
folder.

Here is how I would like utility registration to behave:

I go to the site management folder and add a utility. The registration for 
this utility should automatically be created and activated. Here the name of 
the utility in the SMF and the registered name are the same. If someone wants 
to change it, they can always go to the registration and do that. Also, when 
utility is renamed in the SMF, there should be an option to change the 
registered name as well.

In the case that an active registration already exists for a particular 
interface/name pair, a screen should appear that asks the user what to do. 
Possible options include (a) Deactive the old registration and activate the 
new one or (b) leave the new one deactivated.

This functionality would require some additional infrastructure. Specifically, 
we need to know which provided interfaces are utility interfaces. I propose 
to use the same mechanism we use for content types and require utility 
interfaces to provide an `IUtilityInterface` marker interface. If a utility 
provides several utility interfaces, several registrations will be created.

Some utilities, namely the ones that used to be services, should *always* be 
unnamed. Thus, for UI purposes *only*, I would suggest that we introduce the 
concept of an `IUniqueUtility` or `IUnnamedUtility` marker interface that 
marks which utilities should stay unnamed. 

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

Until now we have had very little experience with TTW adapters, but I would 
suggest to have a simple interface at first that simply creates an adapter 
registration. Note that the code I am developing now will allow for 
multi-adapters.

Later we can improve this UI in combination with persistent modules. It would 
be so cool, if we could go to a class in a persistent module and say, 
register this class as an adapter requiring this interface and providing that 
one.

> - 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.

I think the current way of doing this is pretty good and straight forward.


Now that we are at it, I think we should think about TTW development in 
general. Once you can have persistent modules, you would also want persistent 
content components. We need to be able to register them and provide basic 
menu entries.

> 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.

I really plan on getting them working again unless it is too deep in the 
zodbcode code.

> - 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.

I agree.

These are just some initial thoughts to get the discussion going.

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