Pier v. Plone

[Keith Hodges]

I think we can compete -eventually.

Pier/seaside
 etc are developed with a minimalist philosophy.
Plone/Zope
etc have an everything and the kitchen sink philosophy.

If you spend time integrating all of the minimalist bits we already have 
then we may start to have a platform which can compete.

e.g 1 x Magma Server to n x Pier clients should work "out of the box". 
Its just a matter of trying it and doing the configuration.

Personally I am a kitchen sink kind of person since it takes me a lot of 
effort to see the path from A to B without concrete examples.

At present building pier/seaside apps are like building a den with lego 
rather than cardboard. You can assemble what you want out of lots of 
little pieces, and it will be quite robust. If you want a custom piece 
you take one you already have and adapt it a bit and carry on building.

With plone/zope, you take your cardboard boxes to build your den,  the 
boxes are bigger so you could build your whole den very easily, but 
adapting boxes is much harder because they are a bit more flimsily 
assembled and the underlying frameworks are not so concise. My limited 
experience of zope a few years back when I did attempt to use it for 
serious things (my ex-company corporate site uses it even today) under 
the hood is that it is awful code/design. Easy things are easy and 
slightly more difficult things are impossible.

In smalltalk/seaside everything is moderately difficult, but everything 
is doable in a moderately difficult kind of way..

When you add pier, it becomes, some things are easy you just configure 
and arrange the components, and the rest is moderately difficult, but 
still everything is doable in a moderately difficult kind of way once 
you understand it.

If you want to build a mansion out of card board boxes then, you will 
probably get going quite fast.
If you want to build a mansion out of lego its going to take some time.

best regards

Keith