Some Zope 3 Quick Starts and Resources

I've been reminded, in some excellent email exchanges, that there is no real site for Zope 3. There is dev.zope.org/Zope3 - the Zope 3 development Wiki, but not much else. I think that it may be due, in part, to the fact that Zope X3.0.0 had the 'X' in the name and wasn't quite taken seriously as a final release? I don't know. But now that Zope 3.1.0 is released and the 'X' (which previously stood for experimental) has been dropped - Zope 3 has truly arrived. However, although there are at least two books available covering Zope 3 development and usage, there isn't much in the way of informative and "quick start" web sites right now. Having not the time to make one myself, nor wishing to request someone else whose time is also limited to do so, I want to just point to a couple of Zope 3 Quick Starts that are showing up.

Benji York's Quick Start

Benji York has started compiling this quick start. It is not based on Zope 3.1, but rather on a pre-release version of Zope 3.2 (due this winter) from Subversion with instructions to check out. Personally, I prefer using release versions which use a more familiar "configure; make; make install" process. But setting up aside, Benji's document is helpful and comprehensive and also showcases some Zope 3.2 features such as zope.formlib.

My personal complaint - or just a note - about Benji's piece is that he takes the world's stupidest example application, Hello World!, and shows a verbose Zope 3 solution for a situation that is quite simple. So people may look at it and go "It takes all of that to do "Hello World!?!?" when that is not the point. The point is showing the various aspects of Zope 3 development - using zope.schema, persistence, and configuration via ZCML.

Zope 3 in 30 Minutes

This one showcases a bookmark application which runs and works in the default Zope skin (but should work in most skins that build on the default layer). Um, don't worry about skins. What's important here is that this is an application with containers and objects and testing. In its current version, the author is short on explanatory text, but it is full of working code. There is a fair amount of ZCML to look at, but what sort of domain specific languages could or should be used for configuration is another debate.

Both of the above are young drafts, but they do provide a couple of decent places for getting started without a book.

Some other resources:

Simple Todo

The Simple Todo Application is a series of posts that I wrote on Industrie Toulouse which has now been properly archived. The series went up to a usable point, but still could have gone farther. I also don't have some screen captures properly re-linked yet and am unsure when I might get around to that. But still! There it is. And I know that this content should be reworked and re-released online soon by another party.

World Cookery

The site supporting Philipp von Weitershausen's book, Web Component Development with Zope 3. The site is likely to expand soon with more useful information. But along with supporting the book, it contains downloads of source code from the book, and also of the code that runs the site.

Z3 Base

A collection of Zope 3 related software. There is a great trove in the subversion archives. This is where Five came from. Five allows Zope 3 software to be used in Zope 2. It also houses sqlos which is a SQLObject Support package for Zope 3, which allows SQLObject objects to fit into the greater Zope 3 application architecture. I don't know how well that's been maintained, but it is definitely an interesting project to look at.

Z3ECM - Content Management for Zope 3

This site has blogs, documentation, proposals, movies, prototypes, and more, for building a high class content management platform on top of the Zope 3 framework. There is a lot of information and ideas floating around here, and the animations are very impressive.