What is zen really like?

[Ani]

Hi,
I've been asked to hire a programmer to eval zen for a project. Ive
been told that there is noone with zen out there because its too new.
What skills should I look for? Is zen like .NET or like Rails? What
kind of skills will they need to do zen?

Ani

[Herman Slagman]

"Ani" <anitas...@googlemail.com> wrote in message
news:1170958391.6...@v33g2000cwv.googlegroups.com...

Rails (or other Ajax based frameworks) comes pretty close regarding the
client side stuff.
But you can't really evaluate Zen without thorough knowledge of Cache (csp
and objects).

Herman

[George James]

Herman
I'm not sure that Zen is anything like rails. There is some similarity
in function between rails ActiveRecord and Cache Classes, in that they
both provide an object view of a database, but Zen is not Cache Classes.
Anyway I doubt you'd be able to pursuade any rails developer to see the
need to add Zen to their CV, especially if they were any good - rails is
hot stuff at the moment.

The two unique facets of Zen that I see are 1) the automatic
synchonisation of instantiated classes on the server with the browser's
DOM on the client and 2) the mechanism for building forms using a simple
boxes within boxes layout model.

I'm not aware of any other technology out there that has either of those
features - as far as my knowledge extends these appear to be totally
unique. So the chances of getting someone off the street with similar
skills would seem to be pretty slim. (That, of course, raises the
question of what value having Zen skills on your CV would be - but I
won't go there.)

The AJAX side of things is pretty well hidden in Zen, it does all that
for you so specific AJAX skills, per se, would not be useful. However
an understanding of this kind of mechanism would probably be helpful.

Since object instances are exposed in the browser's DOM then JavaScript
or VB script would be pretty essential skills especially DOM
manipulation. A good understanding of cross-browser differences in the
DOM are probably vital if need to do more than the basic controls
provide and want it to work on multiple browsers.

Probably the best skills to bring in are solid Cache Objects, CSP and a
decent general understanding of basic web technologies like HTML,
JavaScript and good UI design. I can't imagine that php or .net or any
of the countless other ways of building web apps would be of particular
advantage for Zen.

Regards
George

George James Software
www.georgejames.com

[Bill McCormick]

If you have not played with Zen lately there are 2 other new aspects of
Zen that are very cool. One is the MVC controller - this is a data aware
component that can be used to tie a form back to a database object. Like
the CSPBIND in a way but object aware. The other is the report engine.
there is a built in SQL enabled report writing toolkit fot outputting
formatted HTML documents that includes the ability to generate PDF and
XSL-FO <sp?> documents.

[michael]

I am relatively new to Cache and have recently downloaded/installed the
latest release from ISC. I've been slowly working through the "Building
Web Applications with Cache" tutorial, but cannot get my CSP pages to
display. When I point my browser to:
http://localhost:1972/csp/user/film.csp a blank page is returned. I
haven't modified anything with the CSP Gateway configuration.

Can anyone provide an idea as to what I am doing wrong?

thanks

Michael