[Zope3-dev] Some thoughts on Zope 3, Zope 3 applications, and Zope 3 instances

[Stephan Richter]

On Wednesday 03 January 2007 17:12, Jim Fulton wrote:
> In summary, I'm seeing Zope 3 applications as separate entities from  
> the OFS.  The OFS application isn't something we'll use directlty.  
> Instances will be instances of our applications, not of Zope 3.
>
> I should note that there have been a number of sucessful Zope 3  
> applications that were not the OFS.  In fact, some of the earliest  
> production Zope 3 applications were not based on the OFS.

The short answer is that your experience reflects mine.

I too think that the OFS (or the ZMI how I usually call it) is not useful, and 
I personally do not reuse their UI components either. However, as you also 
pointed out, we use a lot of the packages that were developed for the OFS.

Honestly, I would not be sad to see most of the UI code in zope.app go away. 
We rarely use it, since we use Python code to configure local components and 
do not even write/register views for the OFS/ZMI in our applications.

On the distribution side, I really do not have much experience. I can only say 
that we still use package-includes, but I usually develop Makefiles (or BAT 
scripts in Windows) that remove the package ZCML files that we do not need. I 
can easily see myself switching to a different pattern here, as it seems to 
have the same effect. (I really hope that Roger Ineichen or Bernd Dorn are 
speaking up about deployment, since they do the deployment for the 
applications I was working on.)

As to packaging, I hope that once we are using eggs, we will have more than 
one Zope 3 distribution. One that is the official Zope Foundation one, 
perhaps a security-certified one, and one with many bells and whistles 
included (i.e. many of the z3c, zc, etc. packages). This will give newcomers 
nice entry points. When we develop our own applications, we will create 
different distributions.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training