Movies, audiences, wasted effort, was Re: [Zope3-dev] The vision thing

Martijn Faassen faassen at infrae.com
Tue Mar 7 08:42:27 EST 2006


Paul Winkler wrote:
[snip]
> I'm hoping to see a similarly interactive, yet long-term-sane, 
> working style evolve for in zope 3.  Maybe we'll get there
> with Persisent Modules and fssync. 

This is an issue that's important to me, and to Jim. We had a discussion 
about all of this in various weblogs a few months ago - I referenced 
them earlier in some of these threads.

I get the impression that Jim wants to drop the promise that Zope 3 is 
going to gain TTW development features though. It hasn't happened so 
far, and it's misleading peope. He wants to refocus these efforts to 
Zope 2's ZMI as far as I understand.

I'm not sure whether this is the right wa to go - any presumed new-style 
TTW development tools would hopefully leverage the Zope 3 components, so 
even though I'm targeting a Zope 2 audience initially perhaps I'd still 
like my newly developed system to work with in a pure Zope 3 
environment. This means that dropping our promise that we're going to 
regain functionality in Zope 3 may not be the optimal approach in all this.

> If there's a moral to this story, it's this:
> Scaffolding that gets you up and running with a minimum of
> fuss is a great thing.  Rapid interactive and iterative development
> is also a great thing.  But if you can't easily transition from there to
> more complex apps that are still maintainable, it sucks. It's irritating
> to have to throw away some of your knowledge and completely replace it
> with new ways of thinking; it's better if the new knowledge strictly
> supplements the old.  It's worse than irritating to have to throw away
> your work and rebuild it from scratch; it's better if your new work can
> cleanly leverage the old.
> 
> Put another way, if we consider Jim's first two audiences, how do we
> teach a single person to move from "i don't want to have to care" to 
> zope zen master / SVN contributor with minimal wasted effort along the
> way? 
> 
> Today I don't know if there's a clear coherent story to be told there,
> even for zope 2. If there was... wow, that would be a great.
> 
> Sorry if I haven't really said anything new.

It's good to say more people say this in different words. I have a very 
similar experience.

On the one hand, Zope 2 TTW development is a great marketing feature to 
draw people in, and a great way of working for a certain group of 
people, some of whom will never become a software developer because they 
don't even want to.

On the other hand, this way of working in Zope 2 has produced hard to 
maintain code, and creating UIs for it all sometimes has been a waste of 
effort that could've been better spent on making the APIs better, say.

We need a way to enable the Zope 2 TTW person to be productive without 
that person creating huge maintenance costs later on. Code created by 
ZMI developers should look like something that could also be on the 
filesystem, and can be checked into SVN, and refactored and developed 
further, i.e. be taken into real maintenance without major hurdles.

Regards,

Martijn


More information about the Zope3-dev mailing list