Alternatives to ZClasses.
Well the first thing is to take a look at Grok.
Here is an excellent email written by Philipp von Weitershausen. GrokExample It quite addresses my concerns.
Here is the rest of my original posting.
The question is what are you going to use for a development environment?
- Relational Databases, with a framework.
- Ruby-On-Rails is the hot such product today. But it is just too much complexity. There is the relational database, the object model, and the mapping layer.
- Commercial Object Databases.
- There is Versant, Objectivity, GemStone?, ObjectStore? are all interesting products. The problem is that they are not open source, so you cannot make the changes you need, and they are not free software, so they get very expensive. I like GemStone?, but there are so many more 3rd party libraries in Python. Python is much more open to the world than smalltalk.
- Zope 3.
First I have to thank Stephan Richter for the excellent Zope 3 book which helped me to finally understand what Zope 3 is all about. But it is too complex for me. And it is too sophisticated for my simple needs. It has the concept of an interface. Any class which honors that interface can interact with my class. I have a simpler world view. If I have a company object, it points to a person object. Only types of person can be pointed to. Maybe I can have 3 types of person, and so it can point to any of 3 types. Much simpler. Also Zope 3 has a security concept of Space Suits to make objects safe. With all due respect, it sounds like I have to be a rocket scientist to understand it. I just want classes to have read and write permissions, view edit create and delete permissions. Much simpler. I am also much more interested in operating on an appliction schema. I like ER diagrams.
I just get bad vibes from Zope 3. If it were to have taken off, it would have done so by now. Something is odd there.
- Zope 2 File System Developers.
Well this is the best alternative. But if you look at how to do a Zope 2 product, there is way too much junk I have to add in there. I am just not that smart.
There is a deeper issue. I have known people who can write code that executes almost the first time. For less structured people like me, we need a more structured environment. Click here for the 5 types of fields you can add to this ZClass? works just great for me. Gustibus non est disputabum.
If you are just starting to develop for Zope, you may want to create what is known as a disk-based product instead; or you may want to try TTWType or CPSSchemas. How to add custom content types lists other options.
Zope 3 has (will have ?) a successor called PersistentModules.