[Zope3-dev] RFC: Content Providers and Viewlets

[Stephan Richter]

Hello everyone,

I am pleased to announce that we are finally at a stage with the development 
of content providers and viewlets to ask for feedback from the rest of the 
community. The code, purposefully leaned on the ideas from the Java world, 
was originally written by Roger and I rewrote it a month or so back. During 
the Neckar Sprint last week, Roger and I finally had the chance to talk about 
it in person and got a lot of feedback from other sprint participants, 
especially Helmut and Bernd.

The resulting packages, zope.contentprovider and zope.viewlet, are based on 
Roger's and my personal experience with real world use cases. The code can be 
found at:

http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/branches/roger-contentprovider/

Since the code is already written, I have shied away from writing a proposal, 
but instead embed the motivation and design goals into the developer 
documentation:

http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/branches/roger-contentprovider/src/zope/contentprovider/README.txt?rev=39465&view=auto
http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/branches/roger-contentprovider/src/zope/viewlet/README.txt?rev=39466&view=auto
http://svn.zope.org/Zope3/branches/roger-contentprovider/src/zope/viewlet/directives.txt?rev=39110&view=auto

We would like to propose to include those packages in Zope 3.2. Note that 
those packages specifically do not implement portlets and thus JSR-168, since 
other parties, namely Zope Corp. and Jean-Marc, have also developed portlet 
systems that we want to look at first, before proposing a core solution.

What are we looking for?

- Comments on the Python API.
- Comments on the ZCML API.
- Comments on the ZPT API.
- Use cases that you might think are not covered by the design and 
  implementation.
- Whatever you like to say about it...

Roger will use those two packages in the next week to update the Boston skin 
and thus demonstrate a fairly complex application of the code base. Further, 
the SchoolTool project is already using an earlier design of the code and I 
will switch to the new one as soon as possible to also provide real-world use 
of it.

Thanks for reading this far! And even more thanks, if you send us some 
comments! :-)

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