[Dev] Re: [Design] Vista prototype

[Michael R. Bernstein]

(moving over to Dev)

On Fri, 2002-11-01 at 15:57, Patrick Phalen wrote:
> 
> On Friday 01 November 2002 12:00, Brian Siano wrote:
> >
> > Mitch probably knows this part already, but for everyone else, where's what
> > I'm talking about. Remember, in Ecco, the term "Folder" referred to the
> > same thing as a "data fields." If an Item was "placed in the Phonebook
> > Folder," it meant that that Item had a value in the data field called
> > "Phonebook."
> >
> > In Ecco, one could create something like a "package" by arranging the
> > Folders in a hierarchical fashion under another Folder. For example, for
> > the Phonebook, there was a Checkmark folder called "Phonebook." And in the
> > Folder view, one could arrange all of the various contact-oriented data
> > fields as sub-folders under the "Phonebook" folder. This enabled a user to
> > have a "Phonebook" column display, rather than a checkmark, a list of those
> > Folders in which that particular Item had data. (I've attached a JPG file
> > illustrating this-- note that the same folder, "Phonebook," can be
> > displayed in two ways.)
> >
> > In a sense, this ability to arrange the folders hierarchically was a kind
> > of "Package." So were Ecco's "Forms," which were basically lists of
> > specific Folders that one could enter data into without leaping all around
> > the data structure.
>
> The Ecco feature which Brian describes sounds reminscent of Gil and Lorenz's 
> concept of Environmental Acquisition, a powerful notion, discussed here in 
> one of Jon Udell's Byte columns: 
> http://www.byte.com/documents/s=705/byt20010614s0001/index.htm

Zope of course relies heavily on Acquisition in it's application and
site development model. Acquisition can have some rather unexpected side
effects, and future versions of Zope will no longer make Acquisition
implicit, instead a developer will have to explicitly turn it on for a
particular object.

In any case, Acquisition more or less relies on an object containment
hierarchy to determine the acquisition context. My understanding of
Chandler's design (from reading the tea leaves) is that whatever
hierarchical views exist will be entirely 'virtual'.

Cheers,

Michael Bernstein.