About Cromlech

Cromlech is the namecode of a toolkit based on the ZCA, Martian and a tiny subset of Grok’s grokcore packages.

The project and motivation was born from an extensive experience with Zope and Grok, in the domain of custom WEB application development.

The focus was : a very small and clean dependencies list, a traceable and understandable publication process, the use of well defined and precise structure that don’t overdo their part. Long story short : the full control of the stack. The base philosophy is : spend your time coding, not trying to understand and parameter. If it’s not there, do it yourself.

What is Cromlech ?

Cromlech is divided in small packages that are dedicated to defining components. To the Cromlech Team, Zope has shown the limit of the Component Architecture provoked by the shipping and deep intertwinement of the definition and the implementation. In order to deliver a truly pluggable and clean system, the Cromlech Team took the decision to strictly separate the implementation and the definition.

This is the reason to be of the 2 main Cromlech packages.

cromlech.io

cromlech.io defines the primitive and utmost basic entities of an application : the request, the response and the actors linked to it, namedly the publication and the application itself.

cromlech.browser

cromlech.browser is the backbone of a webapplication. It defines an extensive set of publisheable actors, from the forms and views to the sub-components, known in Zope/Grok as viewlets, viewletmanagers.

This package is more or less similar in the idea to zope.browser, that tried and failed in separating the component definition of the actual implementation. It failed by the lack of responsivity of the community and the already monolithic nature of most zope packages.

Does Cromlech do something else ?

Actually, yes, it does. The previous statement was not completly true : we do ship some implementations, but not along with the definition. Some Cromlech packages do provide framework-level components and others, merely utilities or ‘fundamental’ middlewares.

Unessential definitions

  • cromlech.container

implementations

  • cromlech.dawnlight
  • cromlech.zodb
  • cromlech.webob

middlewares

  • cromlech.security
  • cromlech.beaker

utilities

  • cromlech.configuration
  • cromlech.wsgi

Dolmen and the application-level components

dolmen.layout

x

dolmen.view

x

dolmen.viewlet

x

dolmen.message

x

dolmen.content

x

dolmen.menu

x