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

[Ivo van der Wijk]

On 5/29/05, Shane Hathaway <shane at hathawaymix.org> wrote:
> Ivo van der Wijk wrote:
> > 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?
> 
> I think the main difficulty is configuration.  Actually, the word
> configuration makes it sound easy.  ZCML is more like plumbing than
> configuration.  Currently, I feel like the only way to develop
> comfortably in Zope 3 is to memorize the plumbing strewn about in ZCML
> files.  I can do that, but I want my friends to be able to maintain the
> software I write, and right now they can't if I use Zope 3.
> 

I've learned to find my way in other people's zcml, though it's indeed
difficult that certain functionality/properties are defined in zcml
(somewhere hidden away) and some are defined directly in python. Even
with my own code I tend (as I described) to make conflicting
definitions, not knowing what/where the exact problem is.

> With that in mind, I started working this week on a wxPython-based Zope
> 3 configuration editor.  Right now there's just a skeleton of a UI, but
> the UI is already designed to ease most of the things I find difficult
> when writing for Zope 3.  Here is a screen shot of what I've put
> together so far.

Sounds and looks interesting. I've been considering to write (at
least) some sort of zcml browsing tool, but it was less trivial due to
the ease of defining your own zcml directives (and the unknown
semantics of these "third party" directives).

The ZMI introspector is the best tool for now to determine what your
code/class/application *really* "looks" like.

Still, this doesn't solve the masking of errors/tracebacks by
PageTemplates/ZCML -- I'd really like to see a fix for this.

Cheers

Ivo


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