* Stephane Bortzmeyer ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) [010208 08:28]:
> On Tuesday 6 February 2001, at 21 h 57, the keyboard of Chris Winters
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > I'm jazzed to announce the public release of OpenInteract, an
> > extensible web application framework using mod_perl and the Template
> > Toolkit as its core technologies.
>
> Anyone compared it to Zope <http://www.zope.org/>? I'm hesitating.
Hi Stephane,
Sorry I missed the conversation earlier. Rotten time for the power to
go out on my mail server...
Well, everyone who has worked on OpenInteract would certainly be
flattered by such a comparison. I think a lot of people have been
inspired (and even made a little jealous) by Zope and the attention
its drawn to Python. Competition is a healthy thing. :-)
To be honest, I don't know as much about Zope as I probably
should. However, after tooling around with it for a bit there were a
number of lessons I've drawn.
* Make it easy to develop custom modules. Like Zope, OpenInteract makes
it pretty simple to write a self-contained module that implements some
functionality, package it all up and send it to someone else to
install on their server.
* Make installation easy. Zope has an easier time of this because it's
more self-contained, but it's extremely important for people to
install the server without going through painful contortions. My
experience with many other software packages has been this -- if I can
get something running quickly, it's worth my while to look into it
further.
* Be consistent. In Zope, everything is (or is supposed to be) an
object. We try to do the same thing. This makes certain tasks (like
object/task security or relating entirely disparate things) possible
and even pretty easy. Once you've got the mindset it also opens up
interesting possibilities :-)
* Even awkward browser-based tools can work. Using TEXTAREA boxes to
create templates and pages is clunky but amazingly handy. And for most
people it's all they need. People who know what they're doing can
import templates to the database in their sleep, but don't design
everything around them.
I'm sure there are more similiarities and differences. (Along with
strengths and weaknesses, but we can do that on the openinteract-dev
mailing list. :-) I'd be interested in what people who know more about
Zope think are its strengths and weaknesses.
Chris
--
Chris Winters ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
Building enterprise-capable snack solutions since 1988.
