[z3-five] Re: [Archetypes-devel] Future of Archetypes

[Martijn Faassen]

Jean Rodrigo Ferri wrote:
> Sidnei da Silva escreveu:
> 
> Hi Sid,
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 09, 2004 at 11:49:16AM -0300, Jean Rodrigo Ferri wrote:
>> Hi ppl, I'm doing a analisys of the future of some
>> Zope/Plone technologies and a inevitable question is on: -
>> What's the impact in Plone/Archetypes with the Zope3 release?
>> 
>> One word: Five. 
> 
> Tx for your "One word" but it's really so little for my little mind!
> :) Five is a project to integrate Z3 tecnologies in Z2, and what the 
> relationship with Plone/Archetypes and it's future?
> 
>> http://codespeak.net/z3/five/


All right, I'll jump in, from a Five perspective, with some of my ideas. 
I also added in the Five mailing list, as that may be more appropriate 
to this discussion. I'm sure Sidnei is actually a better source of 
information than myself on his thinking on how Archetypes would fit in 
with Zope 3, as my knowledge of Archetypes is limited, and he knows Five 
as well as I do.

Five is a way to make the transition between Zope 2 and Zope 3 easier, 
by allowing you to use Zope 3 technologies within Zope 2 already. 
Existing Zope 2 projects, like Plone, can start to use Zope 3 technology 
today.

Now on to Archetypes:

Zope 3 has a schema/forms system. With Zope 3 you can define object 
schemas, much like you do with archetypes as I understand it. Zope 3 
also has a form system, where widgets (views for schema fields) are 
associated with fields to render them as HTML. It also can do input 
validation.

Five already makes some of that machinery available for use in Zope 2, 
though more is to come.

In many ways Archetypes offers a lot more power than Z3 schema/forms, 
especially in the area of sophisticated types of fields. Schema/forms is 
extensible however, and there's no reason why it couldn't grow to 
support this.

Zope 3 schema are just a kind of Zope 3 interface, and these bring with 
them all the other parts of the Zope 3 component architecture, like 
adapters and the view system. This is a very flexible system allowing 
you to add new functionality to existing content objects without having 
to modify them. With Five, that works in Zope 2 too.

Eventually there could be a migration where Archetypes-based objects 
first grow Zope 3 interfaces, and thus gain the previously mentioned 
flexibility. Next up, there would hopefully be a further convergence 
between archetypes schemas and Zope 3 schemas, where archetypes schemas 
might start to look more and more like Zope 3 ones. I'm not sure what 
how that would go, but perhaps Sidnei has more ideas.

Regards,

Martijn