On 23 Jul 2007, at 17:51 , Daniel Nouri wrote:
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.
Maybe the reason is that viewlets are not the best starting
point for
Plone's use case?
I think they are. I would just implement the API very differently. I
just wish
the Plone developers would have asked us for comments when using
Zope 3
technologies.
Martin Aspeli and I were in close context when he implemented
plone.portlet. While I too was a bit overwhelmed of the amounts of
machinery it ended up using, I also acknowledge the various
complicated
use cases that it's trying to solve.
I wonder if that machinery would have been considerably less heavy
if we
would have sticked to CMF expressions and the like for registrations
(compare CMF's actions tool). I keep being amazed by how much
flexibility I
can achieve by simply combining Python expressions with views, e.g.
include
this element if "context/@@plone/isRTL". (I know you're not a big
fan of
the @@plone view, but it's just an example. :)
Python expressions can certainly be very powerful, but they have
their limits. Just like adaption does (the isRTL use case is hard to
do with adaption, I suppose).
In the end, most of the machinery
is there to support TTW configurability. I find this part is
generally
underestimated, both in effort and in LOC (probably because we
have so
little of it on Zope3 these days).
What do you mean by "this part is generally underestimated". Do
you think
it's understandable that it's grown so complex,
Yes, at least for the use cases that Martin brought up. Note that I
tried to warn him several times not to over-engineer, but I think
it's normal that at the beginning you always end up doing that. It's
never too late to simplify by introducing shortcuts...
plone.portlet seems to enjoy some success, though. Geir Baekholt told
me, for example, that their new version of LinguaPlone is using
portlets
to render content that's commont to all translations of a document
(e.g.
figures).
Well, any "modern" Plone Product will have to adopt the new
portlets sooner
or later. (There is a backwards compatibility mode, but still.)
That's why
I'm making such a fuss out of it. ;)
Who says that the backwards compat mode has to away. Or that there
can't be another shortcut that handles all the simple cases?
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