[Zope3-dev] Re: The elevator speech for Zope 3

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

On 8 Oct 2007, at 13:30 , Oliver Marx wrote:
>> Yup. Now let's drop the "3" in that sentence, because all of this  
>> applies to Zope software as a whole. This is, in fact, one way to  
>> sum up the way the Zope project as a whole works.
> I have no problem with that. The simpler the better. As long as the  
> new comers learn Zope 3 and not Zope 2.

That's the idea.

>> http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/zopeproject is probably the  
>> fastest and easiest way to get started nowadays. One command and  
>> you're set up with a sandbox. If you haven't got Zope 3 downloaded  
>> yet, it will do so as well. It selects a set of libraries that are  
>> common in most applications and installs them by default. You can,  
>> of course, get rid of them later on.
> I will have to look at zopeproject. Without having looked at it -  
> My guess is that I would like a little more flesh on the bones -  
> like z3c.form(demo). Remember it is for people who are *new* to  
> Zope. I would love to see a set of extjs widgets as well.

It's always an act of balance figuring out how much boilerplate we  
give to the users and how much we don't. zopeproject is a tool for  
getting started with *your* application, not a demo app. If somebody  
wants to go and build demo sites with Zope 3, then I'd welcome such  
an effort. It's just not what zopeproject is about.

By the way, there are a number of demo Grok apps in the repository:  
http://svn.zope.org/grokapps/. Another one is here: http:// 
codespeak.net/svn/z3/NudgeNudge/trunk/

>> Then of course there's Grok (http://grok.zope.org) which builds on  
>> the Zope Libraries and aims at making it all much easier. It too  
>> has a "click clack install" along the lines of zopeproject; it's  
>> called grokproject. And a while ago, I demonstrated how you could  
>> create a TodoList application in 15 minutes with it: http:// 
>> www.archive.org/details/grok_todo_part1. Note that Grok has  
>> evolved a bit since then and adding any kind of ZCML or working  
>> with the ZMI is unnecessary nowadays.
> I have looked at Grok. I love the ideas. But it feels like its a  
> little too much convention over configuration. I do not hate zcml.  
> I hate to write zcml. If there was a way to auto generate zcml and  
> way to overwrite that zcml when needed - then I would be a happy man.

I realize that Grok's message is currently a bit misunderstanding.  
With Grok, you can spell out everything that you spell out in ZCML.  
Every little detail. But: if you adhere to some conventions, you can  
save yourself some typing. You don't have to adhere to those  
conventions at all. But in that case you'll have to do the typing  
again. The typing is, of course, much nicer than ZCML, because it's  
in Python and frankly, it's much more coherent than ZCML, easier to  
remember and it prevents context-switching.