From: "Matt Sergeant" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, February 08, 2001 03:01 PM
> On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Perrin Harkins wrote:
>
> > In short, Zope wants to be more, but currently is difficult to figure
> > out. That could be just my Perl experience, but I understood more of
> > OpenInteract in half an hour than I did with Zope after several tries
over
> > the last few years.
>
> Of course that may have a lot to do with your background. Zope isn't a
> tech tool like what we have coming out for mod_perl at the moment - its a
> much higher level. This is both good and bad, of course.
>
> Personally I think CMS' are very important, but then I
> would: http://axkit.com/products/axkit-cms/ :-)
Zope has a very cool concept behind it, an object oriented web, where every
resource behind every URL is an instantiation of a class. Every URL
resource is both content and active component. The idea is that there is
intelligence behind each piece of content, particular to that piece of
content. A PDF object is not just a PDF file, it's also an interface to
index the PDF, provide a summary of itself to an RSS file producer for
example. Folders in the path to a piece of content can affect that content,
so a particular piece of content can take on a different character depending
upon where it is placed. It's more than just a CMS system, it's object
orientation as applied to web resources.
Whereas in OpenInteract, every piece of content is managed by a central
component and one of its methods. Like /BasicPage/edit?id=2345. This is
more like a procedural model than Zope's OO model. I'm still digging into
OpenInteract, having just installed it a few nights ago. Still don't have
much else to say about OI, though it looks pretty neato keen.
Anyway, as for the complexity of Zope: If I understand the architecture
correctly, is that Zope is the combination of what used to be three separate
systems. I know one was persistence, the other was an ORB exposing object
methods to web calls, not sure of the third. Maybe the templating system?
But to me, it seems that they've been joined together in a Frankenstein
kinda way. I mean you see things like "bobobase_modification_time" as the
standard object property, and a jumble of other non-intuitively named
properties, API calls. Not to mention that the DTML language doesn't
resemble any other templating language I've seen, nor does it seem to have
an easily graspable rhyme or reason for things. And, one of my pet peeves,
they're trying to make it "XML compliant". Which to me means that it's
looking more and more like the HTML I'm templating, and that's bad. I would
like my template language to look distinct enough from what I'm templating,
like Template Toolkit's [% %] default construct.
So add on top of that a sparse patch of docs, and it's hard to wrap one's
brain around.
Now, if only I could get back to un-mothballing Iaijutsu/Iaido and do Zope
the right way under perl... :)
--
Leslie Michael Orchard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
ICQ Home: 492905 / ICQ Work: 11082089
