I’ve been reading Carlos’ post about Zope 3, and his thaugths on the role of the framework.

I want to react on this and give my opinion on Zope future and on Python Web developement as well, because I feel that people are not debating on the right thing.

Since a few months, a lot of people in Zope community are seeing Zope 3 as packages that can be used in Zope 2 or elsewhere. This is probably true. A lot of people are also using CherryPy, Django, TurboGears, .., and dropping Zope for some reasons. These reasons are probably right. (my reason to drop Zope would be the ZODB).

But beside this reasons, (every framework has pro’s and con’s) there’s a missing brick in the Python Web Developement ecosystem that exists in Java world: a standard for document repositories. It’s called JCR or JSR-170. Some people in Zope community have talked about it in the past. Nuxeo did a bind as well with nuxeo.jcr, then dropped Zope/Python for Java (which is totally logical given where CPS software is heading).

I strongly believe that the future and the maturity of all Python web frameworks relies at the first place on a common document repository standard, like DB API did with SQL.

Python web developers, it’s time for all of us to cooperate and create such a standard in Python, and an implementation based on SQLAlchemy. This would let Zope drop the ZODB (yepee) and let every web developer use the best of all frameworks (the Zope Component Architecture, the Django approach, etc.) since they would all be able to work with a given repository.

I would like to see the PSF and all framework core developers support such a project.

edit: oups.. I just realized I have used a french acronym in the title (SGBD). The english one is RDBMS