[Zope3-dev] Re: Zope 3 releases?

[Martijn Faassen]

Hey,

Stephan, I tried to reply to your points but I realized I was getting
lost in a sea of semantics and that it wasn't useful.

> > The Zope 3 web application server is not primarily what the Zope 3
> > project appears to be developing. I strongly suspect there are more
> > users of Zope 3 technology within the Plone community than outside it,
> > for instance. If the Zope 3 project cared about developing a web server,
> > you'd think it would do a somewhat better job presenting it to the
> > outside world on a web page, and that there'd be more people to actually
> > make releases?
>
> I think we have very different definitions of application server. For me web
> server != application server. In Zope 3's case I could care less what the Web
> server is. For me, the publisher is really the server component.

I meant to write "web application server", but I didn't write the word
"application", sorry.

I'd like to see a separation between what you consider to be not only
closely allied but *identical*: the pool of Zope 3 components, managed
together by *all* the communities that make use of Zope 3
technologies, and the Zope 3 application server, where you go to some
web site explaining what it's all about, and then download and install
and get some script for to start some webserver so you can access it,
read tutorials on and try to see "Hello world" on your screen with.

Of course since to you there is no difference between the two, it gets
hard to communicate.

The communities that use Zope 3 technologies all have an interest in
improving the common components, and also in distributing such common
components for reuse. Our collective community could be called the
Zope community, where Zope is like a Linux distribution that different
systems make use of, with the major difference that we actually
develop most of those packages within the community instead of mostly
reusing what's developed outside.

The Zope community has always been in the business of building
software that can be used to build (web) applications. For years now
we haven't had a single unified piece as we did when Zope 2 was
(almost) the only game in town in the Zope world.

These days, we have a whole host of related pieces that people can
download and install and build software on top of. We have Zope 2,
Zope 2 + Five, Zope 2 + CMF, Zope 2 + CMF + Five, original Zope 3, and
Zope Grok. What's more we've had things build on top of this that also
have aspects of frameworks or platforms, such as Plone or Silva.

We've also always had components and systems that we use in our
application servers, but could also be used separately: bobo, the
ZODB, zope.interface, buildout, zope.pagetemplate.

We don't have a linear evolution of a single platform at all, even
though for a while we first intended and then pretended it was so with
the naming of Zope 2 and Zope 3. We've stopped pretending for a while,
I think. Instead, we have different communities that share underlying
philosophies and technologies, and interact with each other within the
Zope community. The one thing all these systems have had in common for
the last years is that they all share Zope 3 technologies. If anything
is the Zope platform it's this pool of Zope 3 technologies.

The Zope development community is about the Zope platform. How to
improve the platform? We've done this by improving them, adding to
them, making them easier to evolve independently, supplementing them
with technology like eggs and buildout, testing them, and making them
easier to manage.

The Zope community is also about the things we build on top of the
Zope platform: Zope 2, Zope 3, CMF, Grok, etc. The nice thing about
these is that they make choices for you. If you use Zope 2.10 today,
you know what you have to deal with and you can rely on what you deal
with. With Zope 3.3 it was the same story, and so it is for Grok.
These we can market and offer for download and install. These things
is what we can write tutorials for.

So, the Zope community is a community of communities that are tied
together by their common interest in the Zope platform, on top of
which they build applications, web application frameworks and web
application servers. The Zope platform allows you to roll your own
software directly on top of it if you'd like, but typically you'd make
use of one of the pre-packaged varieties such as Zope 2, Zope 3 or
Grok. All of them are Zope.

Regards,

Martijn