what is your opinion of zope?

[Terry Hancock]

On Sunday 26 June 2005 06:34 pm, Avery Warren wrote:
> I am investigating converting a wiki site to plone. I am having
> a lot of difficulty finding good documentation programmatically
> accessing the ZODB API.

Well, it's really pretty straightforward to use, but you should be
able to find sufficient documentation on the zope.org site. Try
searching for "zodb" and "standalone zodb".

However, I'm not sure why you want this information. If you are
trying to import data into Zope, you are more likely going to be
using Zope, not accessing ZODB directly.

> A lot of the user feedback is centered on how difficult it is to
> get good documentation on developing using these technologies. My
> question to comp.lang.python is "what is your opinion of zope?"

Well, I use it an awful lot.  I manage all of my websites using (plain)
Zope.  The largest Python projects I've been working on are Zope
applications.  It seems to be a very useable framework.  I've never
tried Plone, so I won't respond to that part.

It's biggest problem is that it is a *framework* (as opposed to a "toolkit"),
so it requires you to "think in Zope" when developing for it. This is 
a criticism of Zope 2.x.  This makes for a very steep learning curve.

There's also a lot of the framework which doesn't work very well (e.g.
Sessions? IIRC), and is largely unused. This creates red-herrings which
are also a problem for new users.  There are two competing template
languages (DTML and ZPT), both of which were invented for Zope.  OTOH,
there are standalone ZPT implementations (not so for DTML), and ZPT
seems to be taking the prefered new language.

It appears from what little I've played with it that Zope 3 will go a long
way towards rectifying this problem by moving to a "component"
architecture.  Zope 3 will still be a framework, but you will have
much more control over which parts you use and it will be easier
to use 3rd party (and stdlib) modules with it.  That is to say, Zope 3
will have a lighter framework with more of the 2.x framework moved
into "components" --- making it more like a toolkit.

I think that's a terrific idea.  I still have not really started testing Zope 3
in ernest, though, so I can't really report my experience with it. I have
used the "interface" and "schema" modules from it, and I've been
very happy with using those to establish interfaces in my own software.
(This makes it much easier to delineate "plugins" or places in your
code where 3rd party development can be done, without requiring
the developer to understand your entire application in order to be
able to contribute --- if you are hoping for contributions from 
user-developers on  a free-software application, then this has to be a
good idea).

Without more specifics about what you are looking for, it would be
hard to reply further than this.

Cheers,
Terry

--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks  http://www.anansispaceworks.com