[Zope3-dev] Re: zope.viewlets dependency to zope.app.pagetemplate

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Roman Joost wrote:
> viewlet.py depends on simpleviewclass and ViewPageTemplatefile from
> zope.app.pagetemplate. The dependency of simpleviewclass can easily be
> factored out to zope.pagetemplate.
> 
> The problem is ViewPageTemplatefile which derives from TrustedAppPt. It
> depends in turn on six or seven more classes. Moving these to
> zope.pagetemplate could raise some other problems I didn't think of.
> 
> So, question is: what to do?

In [1] I came to the following conclusion:

> There are several packages that do two things. One one hand they define 
> concepts (IContained, ISite, etc.) and a little bit of machinery 
> (contained(), getSite(), etc.) to deal with these concepts. On the other 
> hand they also provide full-fledged implementations. Those 
> implementations are the ones that end up introducing lots of 
> dependencies (because they involve security, events, persistency, etc. etc.)
> 
> Perhaps it makes sense to factor the *concepts* and the light-weight 
> helpers (contained(), getSite(), etc.) out to separate packages, e.g.:
> 
>   * zope.container
>   * zope.componentsite
>   * ...

Now back to zope.viewlet. It provides two things:

1. a generic definition of viewlet interfaces and a light-weight 
implmentation for a viewlet manager and a light-weight base class for 
viewlets. This is the part that has no dependencies other than on 
zope.contentprovider, zope.interface and zope.component.

2. a bunch of ZCML directives that allow you to dynamically create 
viewlet using a Page Template that runs with the 
zope.app.pagetemplate.TrustedAppPT engine. This is the part that has the 
heavy dependencies.

If people needed #1 without #2 (e.g. in Zope 2 we might), then it makes 
sense separating the two. However, for zope.viewlet I don't think it's 
worth the effort, unless we actually grouped all of the ZCML stuff 
together in one package. zope.app.publisher.browser has lots of ZCML 
magic (browser:page, browser:view, browser:resource) and stuff like 
"simpleviewclass" *shudder* are recurring elements in this code.


[1] http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2007-August/023186.html

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