Picking up Zope 3... again

Today, I decided to pick up Zope 3 yet again. Zope 3.1b1 was released recently, as was Zope 2.8.0. Zope 2.8.0 includes Five, a product for Zope 2 that allows use of Zope 3 technologies. It's my hope that some upcoming work projects will allow me to use Five in order to start transitioning some of our work to Zope 3 without having to do the massive jump immediately. But today, while looking at source code and interfaces for some other simple but effective web applications like Snippets (yes, another Rails app), I decided that I wanted to try a full Zope 3 application again.

There have been some issues - documentation hasn't caught up with Zope 3.1b1 yet. This isn't a huge issue - 3.1 is in beta after all, and Zope 3 documentation and engineering is really quite good, but I was bit in a small change that exists in the default skin setup as I was trying to wire up a custom (and simple) skin for my application.

I'm still quite impressed with the system. It seems more manageable. For small applications, it does feel like there's a fair bit of overhead involved. But, nicely, Zope 3 seems to tell you that you can use as little of zope.app (the main Zope application server framework) as needed.