Vision Document

Background

The goal of this initiative is to leverage the standards and open technologies represented by Mozilla to greatly improve usability, efficiency and productivity in the Zope management environment without sacrificing the benefits of an "Internet architecture".

Mozilla is aligned with the interests of Zope. Mozilla is a pioneer in Open Source projects, and certainly a pioneer in the relationship between Open Source software and commercial backing. It is natural to connect the definitive Open Source Internet desktop project to the definitive Open Source application server project. This gives customers who value Open Source an end-to-end solution.

The current Zope object management environment is grounded in a central idea: anybody should be able to sit down at a web browser and manage Zope using standards. Competitive systems have taken a thick-client approach that focuses on productivity. Zope's management environment pays for the flexibility of an "Internet architecture" by being less productive than competitive "thick-client" environments.

This initiative aims to keep the architectural strength of the current Zope management environment while providing a radical improvement in productivity by embracing some key Mozilla technologies. The goal is not to surpass the traditional "thick-client" IDEs in features or productivity, but rather to get close enough to minimize productivity as an issue and highlight the strength of the Internet architecture.

Projects

Several candidate projects have been identified in support of this initiative. As work progresses on these projects, links to further project information will be added.

RDF Support

This project would provide an RDF API for Zope objects that would minimally provide the ability for objects to generate RDF representations that could be used for tasks such as content syndication or the development of advanced management interfaces.

Model/View architecture design

This project will investigate and provide an architecture for a "Model / View" paradigm in Zope. This architecture would be the basis for providing alternate Zope management environments.

Improved Zope object management environment

This project would provide a more efficient and productive object managment enviroment for Zope using Mozilla technologies such as RDF, XUL, XML, DOM, and CSS. Improvements could include:

• Better navigation and tree views
• Intelligent tab views
• Better selection mechanics
• Context menus
• Hotkey support
• Conventional menubars
• Dialog boxes
• Fewer server requests
• Less reflowing and UI disruption
• Customization support

Content Editor

This project would produce a content-manager focused enhanced editing environment for common content such as DTML, XML and HTML.

Offline or Zope-to-Zope synchronization

This project would provide the ability to "work offline" and synchronize changes with one or more Zope installations.

Multiple Zope site management

This project would allow the management of multiple Zope sites in an integrated environment.

Model/View pattern for Mozilla

This project would investigate the development of an application level model/view design pattern for Mozilla, perhaps culminating in a design pattern paper to be contributed to the Mozilla group.