[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 web root

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Any thoughts or gut reactions?

For the record, my gut reaction: Very interesting idea!

I think there are two parts to the rationale here:

1) Making it easy to quickly prototype an app on the filesystem using
methods that people are familiar with. You mention that above.

I think people like PHP programmers would be very familiar with this
development model. I'm not sure if we should make them feel at home with
Zope 3. I rather would make Python people feel at home first.

I also wonder: How you would evolve a small app built this way to a
larger app that properly lives in Python packages? I guess you would
have to put a lot of effort into converting the .py files to proper
Python modules and the ZCML files to properly register browser pages and
the like. This might still be a small price to pay when you're data
model doesn't have to change, but it feels like Zope would encourage a
more unpythonic development model for beginners and small apps than it
would for large apps built by experts.

To lower the barrier for Zope development, I would personally like to
put more thought into the zope.bobo approach: Coming from pure Python
prototyping you factor more things out into ZPT, ZCML and adapters until
you end up with an application layout that we have today. This would be
very gradual, something that I'm still lacking to see in your approach.

2) The ZODB should not be the only first-class citizen. This part of the
rationale has become apparent in this thread.

Your interesting idea certainly steers into that direction, but it
doesn't have to be the sole solution to improve the RDBMS story in Zope
3. I think, it would really help if the default Zope 3 distribution
shipped without the ZODB. That means it would also ship without "content
types", "local site support", etc. If you wanted all that, you could
still install the necessary packages for the ZODB and the rest later.
The only point is: Zope 3 apps should not need to require the ZODB if
they don't use it. I don't think it's entirely possible today (I
remember Sidnei talking about a lot of pain).

I hope that the use of eggs will allow us to make this very easy, both
for the people who don't need the ZODB & Co. and the ones who do.

Philipp