On Tuesday 17 July 2007 14:28, Daniel Nouri wrote: > plone.portlets introduces some two dozen (!) interfaces/concepts on top of > viewlets in order to implement the flexibility that it needs. E.g. it > introduces an 'available' method/property that controls visibility, which > viewlets by themselves lack. I imagine I could do this with less overhead > without viewlets (see my other mail), or IOW: viewlets don't seem > inherently flexible to me.
Then you do not understand them. They are inherently flexible because content providers are multi-adapters of context, request, and view and viewlets are multi-adapters of context, request, view, and viewlet manager. Using adapted objects as discriminators has opened totally new ways of developing UI patterns in Zope 3. We have heavily learned from using those patterns and I think the new z3c.form* framework benefitted a lot from it. As to portlets. When talking about portlets, the Web community refers usually to features described in JSR 168. Viewlets have absolutely no ambition to come even close to this. In fact, we specifically designed viewlets to do much less with the intend to later implement portlets on top of them. To you viewlets might look extremely simple, in idea and implementation. But this did not come over night and we said: Oh cool, let's use a triplet-adapter to do content providers. Roger and I did an independent implementation of viewlets, then fiercly discussed for nearly a week (people attending the Tuebingen sprint can attest to this) the design goals and implementation. The simple design of both, content provider and viewlets, is thus a result of a deep understanding of UI development problem, not something that was thrown together quickly. You know, often less is more! As to plone.portlets, I think they are heavily overengineered. Last time I looked at its API, it was heavily bloated. This might be a result of being a Plone package though, I do not know, but I would certainly implement them much slimmer. Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student) Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training _______________________________________________ Zope3-users mailing list Zope3-users@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-users
