[Zope3-Users] Generations of Zope and Enterprise Culture

Lennart Regebro regebro at gmail.com
Fri Feb 10 03:11:51 EST 2006


On 2/9/06, Edward Pollard <pollej at uleth.ca> wrote:
> place to be. However, non-Zope development groups on campus have asked
> me: So, what will we do when another version of Zope comes along that
> will completely break backwards compatibility again?

Nothing. Why would yo do anything? Zope3 will not stop working if
Zope4 comes along, just as Zope2 has not stopped working when Zope3
came along.

> Certainly this discussion has to have taken place somewhere before.

Oh yeah. Hundreds of thousands of times with different software. It's
a variation of the "forward compatibility"-discussion, but forward
compatibility is a myth. Nobody can predict the future. Will the
bright minds behind Zope 3 come up with something even brighter and
make something completely new? Possibly, we don't know. Or some Ruby
guys will come up with it and everybody will shift to a new completely
incompatible version of Ruby on Rails. Or Microsoft can suddenly
decide to go open source. NOBODY KNOWS. All we can do is guess, and
most of our guesses wll be wrong.

Therefore: You do today, what works today, and worry about tomorrow
when it happens.

For example, what did you do in 1998, and did you in 1998 know what
you would be doing today? If you in 1998 knew that you were going to
have a Zope 2 based website, then they have a point. If you don't,
then they don't have a point. :-)

Now, how you break that information to management, is nothing I can
help you with. ;-)

> We have as much invested in ColdFusion
> as we do Zope 2 and there is a perceptual issue here I'm not certain
> how to correct via education.

Ah! But unlike Zope2 or Zope3, ColdFusion *will* break when
incompatible versions come out, because it's closed source, so you
can't fix the bugs. With open source you can. If the bug is too
complex, yo can pay somebody to fix it for with. With ColdFusion,
you're up shit creek without a debugger.

> Clearly Zope 3 does so much more out of
> the box to support the standards based semantically driven web site we
> are saying we want in our needs assessment documents, but it is a hard
> thing to sell.

I'm the worst salesman in the world. All I can do is shoot other
peoples arguments to pieces. ;-)

> Second, the existence of Zope 3 has completely shot any support for
> Zope 2 continuation out of the water in our environment. Is this fair,
> or is there life left to the Zope 2 tree we've developed some
> experience in? Should I be considering pitching a Zope 2 solution
> instead?

There is definitely life in Zope2 left. It will without any doubt be
supported and developed for years to come, although the development is
now mostly on consolidation with Zope3.

--
Lennart Regebro, Nuxeo     http://www.nuxeo.com/
CPS Content Management     http://www.cps-project.org/


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