Great Clouseau product for Plone development
http://plone.org/products/clouseau26th of January 2007
I've just found one of the coolest products for Zope/Plone development. It is called Clouseau and it's working like debug command prompt in Zope. But now it can be used from a web page, thanks to Ajax, which makes it really user friendly, usable and so Web 2.0.
I'm so impressed because of its capabilities. I can see whatever happens inside Zope. Peek variables and classes, call methods and functions. I can change fields values or add, edit, delete items. There is even code autocompletion. When I type .app I see on the bottom all objects available on root level of my Zope instance. When I type few more letters the best match appears below edit box and I just need to press TAB and there it is!
The author says that it's working for Plone 2.5.x and Zope 2.9 but I could install and used it on Plone 2.1.4 and Zope 2.8.8. But why is it not a pure Zope product and need CMF/Plone? I think because of the skinning mechanism that is so simple there. There is no need to programatically create templates and javascript files. Just place them in the portal_skins folder and they will be visible in the Plone application context. This is very big constraint for developers who don't use Plone but only Zope or Zope + other frameworks. The solution is to install Plone in the instance just to use it as a debugger. But isn't it too much sacrifice installing 30 products just for that?