Zope 3 Surprise
Posted on March 15, 2007 by oubiwann
I haven't blogged about Zope 3 in a while. Haven't had much of a chance to use it, really. I have had a bunch of people contact me recently about z3 work that I've done in the past, and it's been kind of nice refreshing my memory.
More importantly, though, one of my oldest clients asked for a site update and new set of features for a custom-built z3 CMS solution I started work on about 2 years ago. It only had one update in the past: from Zope 3X to Zope 3.1.0. Tonight, a year and a half later, I performed the second upgrade, and I'll be damned if it didn't take more than 30 minutes to "migrate" form 3.1 to 3.3.1. I use the quotes because the codebase actually ran without any problems on 3.3.1; all I did was make changes to a few ZCML files and update some import statements in order to remove the deprecation warnings. Unbelievable.
This really needs to be emphasized: the upgrade of Zope 3 was freaking amazingly painless. There aren't too many projects that can make that kind of boast. In fact, I know only one: Twisted. When I first started at Zenoss, I wrote some code for them that required deferredSemaphore, but sadly they were still running on Twisted 1.3. Eric Newton upgraded to Twisted 2.4, with only a few minor fixes required. I don't think it took him longer than an hour or two.
Projects that can do this are definitely doing something right. There's a good chance that their software development practices have a lot to teach other open source projects. And hell, closed source projects, for that matter.