[z3-five] Plans for the near future?

[Martijn Faassen]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> After now having worked with five for slightly more than a week, I would 
> first like to say: Good work.

Thanks! I just returned to work from a 3 week break today; got married 
and had a honeymoon. :)

Also thank you for your questions; it's nice to get this feedback and it 
helps setting direction for the project.

> Then I would like to know a bit more about your ideas for the near 
> Five-future.

My only concrete plan is releasing a new version of Five that is stated 
compatible with Zope X3 final and Zope 2.7.3. I think the main open 
issue is the whole thing about the error message for pages that don't 
exist. Last I heard there was talk about fixing a bug in 2.7, before 
that there was some very smart but very scary code in Five that I'd 
rather not see. Not sure about the status now, but I'll find out soon. :)

> Most importantly, are there any plans for implementing z3 
> forms and being able to utilize the same templates in z2 and z3?

These seem to be two questions. I'd definitely like to be able to use z3 
schema/forms, if that is the question. There have been some attempts in 
this direction, but more work needs to be done. I haven't made definite 
plans to commit to this work yet as we don't need it yet, but I'm 
certainly available to assist with this work.

I think we need to have some discussions on the page template issue and 
what the best approach to use is here. There are a number of routes to 
take and various consequences. Let's spin off a thread about this; what 
do people want and what problems do people see?

> And how 
> does this tie in the Jim Fultons plans for Zope 2.9, to be make it 
> possible to write products that can run both in Z2.9 and Z3?

We don't know for sure; I'm not sure anyone knows. :) Jim Fulton likes 
Five and I've worked with him on various issues concerning Five. Tres as 
you can see is active on this list. I think Five or something very 
Five-like stands a good chance of making it into Zope 2.9. Since this is 
open source, in part this depends on ourselves. Even if Five doesn't 
make it into Zope 2.9, Zope 2.9 will support ZCML anyway, and ZCML and 
code written for Five shouldn't be that hard to adapt.

Some of the work planned for Zope 2.8 and 2.9 is orthogonal to Five's 
work. An example is the ZODB 3.3 integration into Zope 2.8. There are 
also plans to share the page template engine between Zope 3 and Zope 2. 
In addition, Jim plans integration of the Zope 3 security infrastructure 
with Zope 2. I don't see a conflict between these plans and Five.

> Five is obviously is a state where you can write stuff with it, as long 
> as your product is all Five, but a lot of people will need to integrate 
> with CMF, and that becomes extremely complicated now...

Infrae sees the same complications with integrating Five and Silva, and 
this is an area I'll try to investigate. For Silva I've been considering 
a more revolutionary transition to Zope 3 page templates and ZCML as we 
have more control over our page templates than is typical for CMF, which 
is a more widely used framework. This is a large step even for us 
though, so more recently I've been pondering more evolutionary 
approaches as well. I hope that this thinking will also be useful to CMF 
developers.

With CMF integration I'll need some help though. Luckily lots of very 
qualified people in the CMF department are active on the mailing list 
already, so I have good hopes we'll be able to work something out.

Regards,

Martijn