Hey, Stephan, I tried to reply to your points but I realized I was getting lost in a sea of semantics and that it wasn't useful.
> > The Zope 3 web application server is not primarily what the Zope 3 > > project appears to be developing. I strongly suspect there are more > > users of Zope 3 technology within the Plone community than outside it, > > for instance. If the Zope 3 project cared about developing a web server, > > you'd think it would do a somewhat better job presenting it to the > > outside world on a web page, and that there'd be more people to actually > > make releases? > > I think we have very different definitions of application server. For me web > server != application server. In Zope 3's case I could care less what the Web > server is. For me, the publisher is really the server component. I meant to write "web application server", but I didn't write the word "application", sorry. I'd like to see a separation between what you consider to be not only closely allied but *identical*: the pool of Zope 3 components, managed together by *all* the communities that make use of Zope 3 technologies, and the Zope 3 application server, where you go to some web site explaining what it's all about, and then download and install and get some script for to start some webserver so you can access it, read tutorials on and try to see "Hello world" on your screen with. Of course since to you there is no difference between the two, it gets hard to communicate. The communities that use Zope 3 technologies all have an interest in improving the common components, and also in distributing such common components for reuse. Our collective community could be called the Zope community, where Zope is like a Linux distribution that different systems make use of, with the major difference that we actually develop most of those packages within the community instead of mostly reusing what's developed outside. The Zope community has always been in the business of building software that can be used to build (web) applications. For years now we haven't had a single unified piece as we did when Zope 2 was (almost) the only game in town in the Zope world. These days, we have a whole host of related pieces that people can download and install and build software on top of. We have Zope 2, Zope 2 + Five, Zope 2 + CMF, Zope 2 + CMF + Five, original Zope 3, and Zope Grok. What's more we've had things build on top of this that also have aspects of frameworks or platforms, such as Plone or Silva. We've also always had components and systems that we use in our application servers, but could also be used separately: bobo, the ZODB, zope.interface, buildout, zope.pagetemplate. We don't have a linear evolution of a single platform at all, even though for a while we first intended and then pretended it was so with the naming of Zope 2 and Zope 3. We've stopped pretending for a while, I think. Instead, we have different communities that share underlying philosophies and technologies, and interact with each other within the Zope community. The one thing all these systems have had in common for the last years is that they all share Zope 3 technologies. If anything is the Zope platform it's this pool of Zope 3 technologies. The Zope development community is about the Zope platform. How to improve the platform? We've done this by improving them, adding to them, making them easier to evolve independently, supplementing them with technology like eggs and buildout, testing them, and making them easier to manage. The Zope community is also about the things we build on top of the Zope platform: Zope 2, Zope 3, CMF, Grok, etc. The nice thing about these is that they make choices for you. If you use Zope 2.10 today, you know what you have to deal with and you can rely on what you deal with. With Zope 3.3 it was the same story, and so it is for Grok. These we can market and offer for download and install. These things is what we can write tutorials for. So, the Zope community is a community of communities that are tied together by their common interest in the Zope platform, on top of which they build applications, web application frameworks and web application servers. The Zope platform allows you to roll your own software directly on top of it if you'd like, but typically you'd make use of one of the pre-packaged varieties such as Zope 2, Zope 3 or Grok. All of them are Zope. Regards, Martijn _______________________________________________ Zope3-dev mailing list Zope3-dev@zope.org Unsub: http://mail.zope.org/mailman/options/zope3-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
