Zope 3.0, and why I won't use it

[Martijn Faassen]

Steve Holden wrote:
[snip]
> Well indeed, the developers are a bunch of smart cookies (no pun 
> intended). But I still await a comprehensible description of how the 
> whole system works for 2.7, let alone X3 - how to put sites together, 
> and the best way to achieve various results, and so on.

There's a lot of knowledge floating around in the Zope 2 community on 
how to do it with Zope 2.x, but I don't know whether there's a book that 
actually has it written all down, and the website is, as you mention, a 
mess.

The Zope 3 website could use a lot of work as well; it's now rather 
intimidating. I think however that a coherent story about Zope 3 is a 
lot easier to write than a coherent story about Zope 2.x, with all its 
years of evolution of code and changing insights. Zope 3 in a way *is* a 
distillation of what Zope developers have learned from Zope 2.

I think one good community project would be a Zope 3 website project, to 
make the Zope 3 web presence a lot more friendly. Zope 3 is actually 
quite pythonic, and the new component architecture, while doubtless 
intimidating at first, is very powerful while being a lot less likely to 
shoot you in the foot than Zope 2's power is.

Zope 2 has the famous 'Z shaped learning curve'. It starts out really 
eay, then it suddenly gets horribly complicated, you're confused for a 
very long time, until after a long struggle you finally can do stuff 
with it, while still swearing at unpythonic behavior.

Zope 3 has (we hope) a saner learning curve. Zope X3 in particular is 
harder to start out with than Zope 2, as there's no friendly clicke-ty 
click web interface. It takes a bit more programmer investment. It 
should however a easier a lot faster than Zope 2, while remaining a lot 
more Pythonic along the way.

I have personal experience with the Pythonic nature of Zope 3, as I'm 
part of another project (Five) that managed to hack part of its 
functionalities into Zope 2. That wouldn't have been possible if Zope 3 
isn't a more accessible library of Python packages.

Regards,

Martijn