Daniel Nouri's Old Blog
Note that this blog is discontinued. You can find my new blog here: Daniel Nouri's Blog.
Fri, 29 Sep 2006
Framework shootout
Of cardinals and ambassadors
It's now almost one month that I work for Infrae, and I enjoy it a lot. I have a nice working environment with friendly colleagues and interesting projects. And I get to share my workplace with Martijn Faassen, which rocks, because I can learn so much from this guy!
The other day I went to the COM.lounge TV page to check out Martijn's keynote at this month's DZUG conference. It was fun to watch. And then I discovered four other very interesting videos from this year's Europython conference in Geneva. I wasn't there, so I was eager to see the recording of the Web framework shootout which took place there. I was particularly impressed about Kevin Dangoor's presentation of TurboGears. If this is not the incarnation of agile development, then I don't know what! Kevin upstaged the other two contestants Simon Willison (representing Django) and Philipp von Weitershausen (of Zope 3).
Drawing the bow back to Martijn's presentation, I totally agree with him that Zope 3 needs another face on the web. Finally, he and some others are doing something about this. They're still looking for help from you!
Also, the eggification of Zope 3 packages, which is landing slowly, will help in making Zope 3 popular in the wider Python community.
Zope 3 = Ninja Power?
But Zope 3 has also another problem IMO: It's hard to grasp. Even if it's less confusing than the huge inheritance trees in Zope 2, Zope 3 has still to go a long way to be as newbie-friendly as, say, TurboGears. Again, Martijn comes to the resuce: In October he'll be sprinting with the people from Gocept with the goal to flatten Zope 3's learning curve. The project is called Grok, and it sounds really promising.
Honestly, I think that if I hadn't known the concepts of Zope 3 before, I wouldn't have understood much of what Philipp explained at the shootout. I don't buy the it's complex because it solves complex problems argument. Python is a good example of a very approachable technology that can scale sky high.
When following the mailing lists of TurboGears, I noticed that their team considers lack of documentation, especially in the form of approachable tutorials, a bug. Now, Zope 3 comes with lots of doctests, which I find great. But they're not exactly approachable for newbies. Not because of their style of writing, but because they are in places where newbies don't look, i.e. in the source tree.
Benji York created the very nice Zope 3 Quick Start Guide, which I personally recommend to anyone who starts with Zope 3. Also, zeapartners.org has two nice little screencasts. We definitely need more tutorials like this! And fewer Zope 3 packages with the hidden ninja wisdom feel to them.
posted at: 04:32 |
1 comments |
category: /devel/zope
|
permanent link |
add to del.icio.us or digg it
| < | September 2006 | > | ||||
| Su | Mo | Tu | We | Th | Fr | Sa |
| 1 | 2 | |||||
| 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 |
| 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 |
| 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 |
Feed of all categories:
rss |
atom
