Hi there, Taking this to the z3lab list. alan runyan wrote: [snip] > I understand wanting everything to have as few dependencies as possible. > But if your talking ECM; we will need integration because the epitome of a > enterprise is *integration* not isolation on zope3 island. I think this is a VERY important topic. My perspective is necessarily different from Alan's, so take this as my words and not as something Alan said, but this takes me off on another rant. Perhaps "integration, not isolation" should become my personal theme for the next year or so, next to "evolution, not revolution", which is one of the ideas that inspired me to work on Five. I think this theme applies to many levels, as we're on many different "islands". CMS --- We're on the island of our own projects. We're on many islands, connected, similar, but still different, within the Zope world, especially concerning CMSes. We're sharing Python, Zope, and in part the CMF, but we're still in many ways on islands. With the recent efforts I have good hope that we'll manage to get off these islands and work together more fruitfully. Great things have happened already, but we need to continue working on it. Zope and Python --------------- We're on the island of the Zope world. We need integration with the Python world. Zope needs to be a good, understandable, well behaved, non-peculiar citizen, so that Python people feel good about working with Zope. This means not only that we try to build systems that are reusable by Python people. This is good, but saying "come play at my house" is not enough. We need to go play at other people's houses and integrate their software into our codebase. Standards --------- We're on the island of our proprietary solutions. Even though our solutions are mostly open source, they're frequently also proprietary, as we invented them ourselves. The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from, yes. But there are many that are useful and traditionally many Zope people and to a lesser extent Python people have said "Why use standard X, just use Python!". If you want to reach out to developers outside of the Python world, if you want to integrate with systems outside of the Python world, you need standards. We need to choose the right ones, and we need to make them as Pythonic as possible, but we do need to actively look at working with them. Languages --------- We're on the island of the Python language. We need to see whether we can reuse effectively libraries written in a language that's not Python. Python does this well with C (though it's not easy to make this work well, witness my struggles with libxml2) but if we say "enterprise" many people hear "Java". We should actively explore the possibilities for opening up the Java goldmine of libraries to our projects. The same applies, perhaps in a lesser extent, to dot.net. There is bridging technology out there we could explore collectively and see how we could effectively bundle this together with our ECM work. What this doesn't mean ---------------------- * that the people in the existing CMS projects are unwilling to work together. I think we're already great at working together, and I just want more and enabling infrastructure to do more. * that I want us to switch to something else than Zope. * that I think using a standard is always better than rolling your own. Sometimes rolling your own is more effective and many "standards" suck. * that I want us to switch to Java for implementation language; I want to use Python. * that I've turned into a boring corporate drone :) I just think that these factors should weigh perhaps a little bit more heavily in our decision making than they have in the past. Regards, Martijn
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