Paul Winkler wrote:
[snip]
I'm hoping to see a similarly interactive, yet long-term-sane,
working style evolve for in zope 3. Maybe we'll get there
with Persisent Modules and fssync.
This is an issue that's important to me, and to Jim. We had a discussion
about all of this in various weblogs a few months ago - I referenced
them earlier in some of these threads.
I get the impression that Jim wants to drop the promise that Zope 3 is
going to gain TTW development features though. It hasn't happened so
far, and it's misleading peope. He wants to refocus these efforts to
Zope 2's ZMI as far as I understand.
I'm not sure whether this is the right wa to go - any presumed new-style
TTW development tools would hopefully leverage the Zope 3 components, so
even though I'm targeting a Zope 2 audience initially perhaps I'd still
like my newly developed system to work with in a pure Zope 3
environment. This means that dropping our promise that we're going to
regain functionality in Zope 3 may not be the optimal approach in all this.
If there's a moral to this story, it's this:
Scaffolding that gets you up and running with a minimum of
fuss is a great thing. Rapid interactive and iterative development
is also a great thing. But if you can't easily transition from there to
more complex apps that are still maintainable, it sucks. It's irritating
to have to throw away some of your knowledge and completely replace it
with new ways of thinking; it's better if the new knowledge strictly
supplements the old. It's worse than irritating to have to throw away
your work and rebuild it from scratch; it's better if your new work can
cleanly leverage the old.
Put another way, if we consider Jim's first two audiences, how do we
teach a single person to move from i don't want to have to care to
zope zen master / SVN contributor with minimal wasted effort along the
way?
Today I don't know if there's a clear coherent story to be told there,
even for zope 2. If there was... wow, that would be a great.
Sorry if I haven't really said anything new.
It's good to say more people say this in different words. I have a very
similar experience.
On the one hand, Zope 2 TTW development is a great marketing feature to
draw people in, and a great way of working for a certain group of
people, some of whom will never become a software developer because they
don't even want to.
On the other hand, this way of working in Zope 2 has produced hard to
maintain code, and creating UIs for it all sometimes has been a waste of
effort that could've been better spent on making the APIs better, say.
We need a way to enable the Zope 2 TTW person to be productive without
that person creating huge maintenance costs later on. Code created by
ZMI developers should look like something that could also be on the
filesystem, and can be checked into SVN, and refactored and developed
further, i.e. be taken into real maintenance without major hurdles.
Regards,
Martijn
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