Benji York is doing good work

Benji York is doing good work

Benji York, a relatively recent Zope Corporation employee, first appeared on my "does interesting stuff" radar due to his work with Zope 3 testing: zope.testbrowser, which promises to bring to Zope 3 testing something I played with before in the context of Silva but never really made very usable: functional testing of the web frontend of code on the server side (utilizing mechanize). Benji's innovation to make this really easy is by integrating it with doctests.

Zope 3 is an extremely well tested framework already and through the efforts of Jim Fulton, Tim "doctest" Peters, Benji York and others is continuing to push the boundaries in this area. At the same time, by using doctest in ever expanding ways, they also pushing forward software documentation at the same time. I haven't seen any other Python project with a stronger emphasis on testing, except possibly PyPy. Zope 3's rock solid, and we know it, as we keep banging on it with more tests.

This is not the only thing Benji has been up to though; today I discovered his new weblog, where he says good stuff on a topic close to my heart: Zope 3 marketing.

Moreover he is actually doing something about it. He's written the beginnings of a Zope 3 quickstart guide that should help people on their way when learning Zope 3. Perhaps it can eventually lead to a "20 minute screencast" on Zope 3. Such screencasts seem to be an essential framework marketing tool in this day and age...