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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb <pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Thoughts on Zope
  • Date: Wed, 11 Aug 2004 12:43:49 +0100

Hi Folks,
Just a bit of stream of conciousness on my first
play with Zope.

Yes it seems to be the all singing all dancing product which can do session managment, and indexed objects and good page templates.

But I don't feel compleatly easy about this. For a number of
not very well found reasons.

1) Everything seems to be placed in a giant object database
Zope-Instance\var\Data.fs
thats the page templates, scripts, and our actual data.

2) All work needs to be done via the web interface.

3) It does not (by default) work through the web server, instead creating its own server with a different port.

As an old unix hack who likes to keep things close to the metal this approach make me go ug.

I like to be able to see whats there in the file system so I can see the different scripts
wwwroot/index.html
wwwroot/index.css
this allows me to access the files in lots of different ways.
I can use my favorite editor, I can backup individual scripts,
I can attach a script to an email, I can do
ls -ltr
to show which scripts were most easily changed. I can run a script through a spell checker, html validatior. I can submit the script via cvs. I can grep, sed, awk, sort, uniq, find ...
I can use perl to parse and generate datafiles and pipe them through
mysql/bin/mysql to generate a table.

At the moment it seems like using zope, I loose all the power of unix instead I'm stuck with the html forms textarea widget which has all the facilities of notepad. And I can only have one edit window open at a time.

Some I feel important questions

1) can we easily extract scripts from zope so we can back them up to CVS.

2) Can we make it work with content outside the Zope sphere, for instance I'd quite like to index the permaculture mailing lists archive,
which are stored in their own manor without having to import the whole lot.

3) I have 1000 photos to upload. Can I automate the process?
I'm going to get very board (and give up) if I need to use a
file upload 1000 times.

4) What if the database gets corrupted? With a monolithic file we could be in danger of loosing everything.

5) Can my rich client (say a java applet) easilly extract data from zope. I might for example want to find the height of all the different willows, but rather than using stateless protocols (http) use a unix socket which will keep the connection alive.

I supose all of these are power user questions. Zope seems great for casual users, but can I do stuff outside the Zope mindset?

There may be stuff which at first seems to be easy using zope, but could have unforsean consequences. For instance in the Zope tutorial (leason 8 on images) it happly let me upload a non image file (warez.exe). This could be a gaping hole.

Another example is the image object, looks great at first sight, but not exactly what we need as we probably want to add more indexing items, such as a list of plant names show in the image, author information, a rating. (Yes we can use properties).

To summerise
Zope very nice system
Worries about power user access
Will it end up being limiting at end of the day
We could probably do what we need in zope
We could just as easilly do what we want in many other systems
It won't really save us much development time
Initially it will slow development as it will (understandably)
be some time before ibiblio get it running.

Anyway appologies for the rant, hitting the learning curve.

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
Tel: 01208 872 963 / 0845 458 4719
Email: webmaster@pfaf.org
PFAF electronic mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pfaf








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