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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: PCPLANTDB <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [pcplantdb] update
  • Date: Mon, 01 Nov 2004 23:24:06 +0000

Chad Knepp wrote:

On a personal level things have really been going my way and I think
taking a break from computers has been quite helpful... sorry to scare
you Stephanie. As I mentioned I am no longer a resident of DR and the
tensions of leaving a community have diminished significantly since
leaving. Other significant events include getting a check and a very
sweet encouraging letter from Scott (Thanks!). As Stephanie said,
Eden is no longer working on galatea.org because it moved to a new
server and my ISP isn't really interested in supporting it. There was
also a couple of days where I wasn't receiving email because of
assumptions I made and assumptions my ISP made about my email account.
I've gone back and read list related stuff in the archives but if you
sent me anything offlist that was important and it bounced back to
you, you could/should resend it. Short of a couple of days of
gardening and bit of organizing/remodelling/domestics I have this next
month entirely free up until Thanksgiving and will then be spending a
week in Michigan with my folks.

I feel very energized to resume work on permaculture.info and would
like to talk about the direction that could take. I am willing to
continue work on HG/Zope if the group chooses this, but I still feel
like the best choice is to start with Eden instead. I've done a
little bit of research, looked at a couple of ORMs and am currently
not really in favor of them because with a relational backend you can
either sacrifice some of the power of the relational model/technology
or your ORM is not very object like. I am currently in favor of the
idea of focusing on the database itself. By putting a lot of energy
into getting a very well structured/correct (fully normalized)
relational database we can have a dataset that is easily manipulated
by a variety of software tools such as Eden, TouchGraph, custom
clients, etc. This is another point Richard was in favor of early on.

Yep I'm still very much in favor. To me it seems like the DB (or object) structure is the heart of the project.

Anyway, I'd like to open a discussion about moving in this direction.
I'd primarily like to hear from John H. and John S. as I suspect that
this may be pretty disappointing to them.

My thoughts in a bulleted list:

o Why not Zope?

There is no denying that Zope has some pretty exciting
technologies. In particular I am still in love with ZODB.
Writing Ack! with just ZODB was easy and elegant and really fueled
my interest in Zope. Zope is basically ZODB with a customized
version of Medusa (ZServer) plus a truck load of features to
remove some of the tedium of web application design.
Unfortunately none of these features includes the sort of thing we
need and some of the features that are in Zope have been difficult
to accommodate at the low level of development necessary to create
a framework for what we need. Although I can see why Traversal is
a Good Thing (tm), I/we really don't need it at all for this
project and it has totally gotten in the way in part because it
doesn't even work correctly.

What is a Traversal when its at home?

> I am still intrigued by the idea of
just wiring ZODB and Medusa (or Twisted) together and calling it
Zip or Pope or something. This would create a nice and simple
framework for using persistent python objects in a web application
environment... some other time.
Curious to know what sort of system we need to run ZODB. Could we run in on a ibiblio account, or is there some problems. Don't know enough about Zope to understand which bit made hosting dificult.

o Why RDBMS?

The relational model and existing RDBM systems are mature
technologies that are well and widely understood and has excellent
documentation. In some ways this makes it simpler and easier to
use than Zope

o Why not ORM (Object Relational Mapper)?

I've been turing around in my head how to implement an ORM for
this project and in the end I don't really think we want to do
this. My reasoning is summarized above in that it is very
difficult to escape the *relationalness* of an RDBMS, so much so
that I question wanting to do so.

Curious about this. Do you have an example?
I've never really been convinced about why we really need objects
for the relativly straight forward tasks needed by the web server.
I think objects will come into focus more when we get onto smart clients
where we may need to do more with the data.

Also if we choose to emphasize
a clean relational dataset cluttering it with objects will make it
unfriendly to other tools.

Rich
--
Plants for a Future: 7000 useful plants
Web: http://www.pfaf.org/ same as http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/pfaf/
Post: 1 Lerryn View, Lerryn, Lostwithiel, Cornwall, PL22 0QJ
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