[Zope3-dev] Making Zope3 more (newbie) developer friendly

[Ivo van der Wijk]

Hi All,

My current impression as a Zope3 newbie developer is that Zope3 can be
an enourmous joy to develop with, but it can also be really
frustrating.

The frustration is mostly caused by cryptic or sometimes irrelevant
errors and stacktraces. Several situations I ran into:

- lots of zcml errors. That is, "included" python code fails, but the
trace ends at the zcml where the error took place, not the underlying
python code. Usually you have to guess what might be wrong depending
on the spefici part of zcml and/or test your pythoncode by hand.

- Errors withing PageTemplates (and/or associated views) aren't
displayed very intuitively either. The PageTemplate causing the error
is usually not mentioned either. If I recall correctly, someone
already had a patch to give more sensible stacktraces for errors in
PageTemplates.

- Duplicate interface definitions sometimes cause the same piece of
zcml to be dumped 4-6 times. Not very informative either, possibly
related to my first remark :)

- Just totally cryptic errors. Zope3 is a component architecture;
interfaces, components and adaprters fly around everywhere and the
average ComponentLookupError doesn't mean alot to me :) Zope3 seems to
be alot of EAFP while LBYL might give more sensible errors.

Are other starting (or perhaps even experienced) Zope3 developers
experiencing this as well? I think the current developer
unfriendlyness might scare people away from Zope3. Especially as a
starter you tend to make mistakes - readable/usable errors are really
important then.

I currently don't feel experienced enough to fix anything about this
(but pointers are welcome). Does anyone have suggestions/proposals how
developer friendlyness might be improved?

Cheers

   Ivo

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