[Zope3-dev] Re: [Zope-dev] Re: Two visions

[Rocky Burt]

On Tue, 2006-28-02 at 13:21 +0100, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Philipp von Weitershausen wrote:
> [snip]
> > I would vote for spelling out Zed (which would also be a little easier
> > to google but might create trademark problems). The namespace package
> > could either be 'z' or 'zed'.
> > 
> > Then again, I really should take Jim's side and stay out of naming
> > decisions.
> 
> Let's please not have a naming discussion again. I think renaming Zope 3 
> is really bad marketing myself and naming discussions mostly a waste of 
> time...

As I sit here spending sooo much time reading this thread, I've finally
decided its time to throw in my own naive point of view as an ex-J2EE
developer and a Zope 2 developer that generally builds applications on
top of Zope2/CMF/Plone.

Let me make a random comments.

1) The Zope 3 name and brand is a marketing disaster (from my
perspective) -- to be honest there's really no way I could see this
actually getting worse by coming up with a new name.  How many times in
the #plone channel do we get asked, "Does Plone run on Zope 3.1/3.2?"
or, "When will Plone run on Zope 3.2" to which we say "no" to the first
question and "dunno" to the second question.

2) Today when I build new applications with Plone, the best I can hope
for is to use Zope 3 as a framework and Zope 2 as a deployment platform.
Although the reality is I still use Zope 2 as a framework faaaar too
much as well.  I'm hoping (expecting) that Five will continue to make
the requirement to use Zope 2 as a framework diminish more and more.  As
a developer, I certainly prefer working with Zope 3 "the framework" over
Zope 2 "the framework".

3) New developers who are moving in to either learn how to use Zope to
develop applications or support existing zope applications of course
immediately download the highest number Zope (zope 3 of course).  They
start using it and (hopefully) enjoy working on it and discover there's
a big zope community with lots of developed applications.  Then this
developer starts googling for a type of plugin/component he needs to
make sure he's not reinventing the wheel and discovers there's a HUGE
plethora of "Zope" applications that do not even run on his latest zope
platform and won't run on that platform in the foreseeable future.

Ok, let me say what I think regarding these things.

If we started treating zope 3 as just a framework and put energies back
into maintaing/refactoring/beautifying zope2 as an application server
that uses that framework at its core (this is essentially what zope 2.8+
is working towards with Five IMHO) then this could help several ways:
  1) we stop spending time reproducing zope2 app server functionality in
zope3
  2) we stop building more into zope2 as a framework (i think this is
pretty much already happening)

Anyway, this still keeps things very confusing from a naming perspective
(mostly for new adopters).  So .... having said all of that, I am
actually +1 on Jim's proposal #2.  What I see from that (someone correct
me if I'm wrong) is the following:

  1) rename zope 3 the framework as Z or zopelib or Zed or something
sensical that doesn't confuse the early adopter's conquest of trying to
figure out which zope to start with
  2) Make zope 2 the application server acquire the name "zope" once
again and be the only app server.  This could only work (from a new
adopter's perspective) if either the application server is given a new
name or given a version number higher than 3.

Who are we worried aboug confusing here? Existing Zope 3 developers?
Zope 2 developers?  I don't think so, those people are smart enough to
figure it out.  So I say lets focus on not confusing new adopters in
which case SOMETHING HAS TO BE DONE ABOUT THE CURRENT NAMING SITUATION!

Kind Regards,
Rocky


-- 
Rocky Burt
AdaptiveWave - Consulting, Training, and Content Management as a Service
http://www.adaptivewave.com
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