I stumbled across Tim Morgan’s website today and felt compelled to write him an email about it (which I did). Two points really: “Tim, you rock.” and “Keep up the good work.”

I, too, have been impressed lately by TiddlyWiki and Ruby on Rails and have been wondering how to reconcile those tools with my Zope and Plone experience. Tim, thanks for starting the ZiddlyWiki and React projects to get things moving in the Zope world….

A few comments regarding the React project… (I only briefly read the website and haven’t checked out the code yet… so forgive me if I have my facts wrong… )

Rails defines the MVC layout in folders on the filesystem… React defines them as folders inside the Zope object database… As a Zope/Plone developer, I would prefer having those folders and class definitions on the filesystem, and not locked up in the ZODB. This also helps to version control and diff the filechanges, and doing continuous builds using standard tools. A big stumbling block for Zope newbies is having everything locked up in the ZODB. I think the “real” filesystem should be used as much as possible.

Just as Rails scripts create a simple folder structure for your application, I would think a similar approach would work with Zope to create a vanilla “Zope Product” on the filesystem for your web application that would be ready to install as any other product.

Also, React’s controllers are defined as Script (Python)* code. The security on those objects limit the amount of code you can run and the libraries you can link to in your code… unless you specifically enable it. Again, defining the MVC as files on the filesystem might be the more extensible approach. The tradeoff is that filesystem code would disable editing through the Zope Management Interface, but I don’t think the ZMI should be used for development, anyway. :-)

I don’t mean to sound negative with those suggestions. Tim, keep up the good work… and thanks for providing some cools bits for keeping the Zope world “cool”.

*["Script (Python)" is a a tortured alias for security sandboxed Python scripts in Zope.]