[Zope3-dev] Re: Mandatory Viewing!

[Martin Aspeli]

On Tue, 07 Mar 2006 18:55:34 -0000, Stephan Richter  
<srichter at cosmos.phy.tufts.edu> wrote:

> There are tools that do round-tripping, like ArchGenXML, which will have  
> Zope
> 3 support in the next release.

AGX (soon to be called Genesis) doesn't do round-tripping. It lets you  
re-generate your code from the model and still preserves method bodies,  
custom methods, and code written in special "protected sections". Full  
round-tripping is incredibly hard, and probably not worth it all that much.

I think it's more important to focus on making development fast and easy  
(e.g. by not requiring server restarts too often, by having a small number  
of concepts to learn and a small number basic building blocks that are  
well-contained and thus easily refactored) than to necessarily support it  
TTW. To be honest, I don't think a browser is a good replacement for a  
decent IDE.

What the CMF/Plone story has shown us, though, is that simple  
*customisation*, i.e. tweaking (primarily of UI templates and very basic  
functionality) is very valuable TTW because it can then become a  
power-user/non-programmer facility. I'd say that a large part of Plone's  
success, certainly, comes from the ease with which you can customise (and  
thus re-use) page templates. Zope 3 does very well on re-use at the  
programmer level with the CA. Making it possible to tweak/re-use  
look-and-feel without having to understand python (or much python) is a  
logical next step.

On a personal note, I also think Zope'd be better off if components could  
be reconfigured without a restart. That way, you could for example provide  
TTW configuration panels for things ordinarily controlled by ZCML (e.g.  
the in-ZODB, user setting overrides the zcml-configured default ... for  
some carefully selected options of course). That'd make it easier to make  
such UIs and make sure configuration tools.

Martin


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(muted)