[Web-SIG] Re: Just lost another one to Rails

[Anthony Baxter]

On Wednesday 13 April 2005 23:05, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Buggy? I don't think ZCML is buggy. Where's that coming from?

I wouldn't say ZCML is *buggy* as such, but it _is_ an utter pain
in the arse to debug and get right. If you spell it wrong, you either
get a broken web application with no useful traceback, or else a 
monstously hideous traceback that's almost entirely useless. 

The only way I found to do ZCML sanely was to copy an existing
product's ZCML and modify it - this is nuts.

> In the mean time, in the world of HTML templating, we see a lot more
> agreement that sometimes a domain specific language is useful. People
> generally don't want to be producing all their HTML from Python
> functions. I've seen far less complaints about ZPT being cumbersome and
> buggy.

That's because when you make a mistake in ZPT, it's nearly always 
extremely obvious what the problem is. This is not the case with ZCML -
well, unless this has changed dramatically since about the middle of
last year.

> That's not say ZCML as it stands doesn't have some didactic/learning
> curve issues. But to reject this out of hand just like that is a bit too
> easy, I think.

Attempting to debug some random ZCML error was what drove me 
screaming away from Zope3 last year (having done a fair amount of
work on and with it). I was spending far more time on debugging the 
"simple" task of configuration and hooking things together than I was 
on _actually_ _writing_ _code_. Screw that for a game of soldiers. 

I _like_ a lot of the stuff in Zope3. But ZCML was just too awful for
me to continue working with it. It was too much like just changing 
stuff randomly and hitting it with a stick for my liking - there were 
far too many different XML tags with non-obvious names and what 
felt like a pile of dead chickens required to get it right.



-- 
Anthony Baxter     <anthony at interlink.com.au>
It's never too late to have a happy childhood.