Exploring Zope

Avi Bryant avi at beta4.com
Tue Oct 28 00:38:29 UTC 2003


John Maxwell wrote:

> What Zope offers, significantly, is an OO model that is entirely 
> web-oriented. Where a system like Squeak gives you an OO playground 
> based on a desktop-and-widgets working environment (not that you're 
> confined to that, just that this is what's offered as the starting 
> platform), Zope begins with a webserver's file-and-folders as the 
> working environment. For someone whose business card says "webmaster," 
> this is a comfortable place to begin; once that "webmaster" then 
> begins to explore the advantages of having a comphrensive object 
> model, you indeed get a wonderful system (Zope's inheritance and 
> aquisition alone are worth the price of admission, compared with most 
> other web app environments). 

Hi John,

It's interesting to hear this.  How does the transition between the 
"webmaster" and "developer" mindsets work?  I'm not a big fan of the 
usual approach, which is "oh, this is still a static html file like 
you're used to, it just has a little bit of code embedded in it".  If, 
on the other hand, Zope succesfully traced a path from static files -> 
objects representing static files -> objects with interesting behavior, 
without too many bumps along the way, that would be worth studying.

 From what I can tell, Seaside is much closer than Zope to being a 
useful object model of the web, when it comes to dynamic behavior - in 
that it puts things purely in object terms, without forcing you to think 
at all about URLs, request parameters, HTTP headers, and so on.  But 
Zope certainly has some interesting ideas about the "content" side of 
things, and I wouldn't mind exploring these some in a Smalltalk context.

Avi





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list