pcplantdb

[Chad Knepp <pyg@galatea.org>]

Richard Morris writes:
 > Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
 > > Does this mean that he only wiki you can run in a Zope
 > > environment is one written in Zope, i.e. Zwiki or some other. Or
 > > does it allow wiki apps that need a mysql database and php to
 > > access those libraries on some other server, i.e. on some other
 > > ibiblio machine where those apps are available globally?
 > > 
 > > I assume that in a Zope environment you can only run apps written
 > > in Zope therefore you are limited to what's currently available.
 > 
 > Too me this is really an important question. How easy would it be
 > to integrate a non zope thing with zope.

How easy is it to integrate any given platform with any other.  For
example how hard is it to integrate php cgis and perl cgis?  Zope has
adapters to allow php and perl within a Zope context.  If this is
really important to you then you obviously want to use Zope.  

If we don't use Zope are you thinking that we would be using PHP?  My
commitment to using python for this project is close to a blocking
level issue.  If we use a python/RDBMS solution I am not at all sure
php would integrate with this easily.  Were you thinking you would
learn python then?

 > Yes we can have different products running, but we could end up with
 > having different ports for different parts, say
 > http://permaculture.info/ - for non zope bits
 > http://permaculture.info:8080/ - for zope bits
 > (unless of course we go for an apache plug in and the sysadmins allow it).

Why?  The URL structure would allow for this.  Example:
permaculture.info/eden to access the old Eden engine,
permaculture.info/pfaf to access PFAF, permaculture.info/hg, etc. and
permaculture.info to be whatever the default is.  'mod_rewrite' is
pretty much a standard part of Apache anyway.

 > Also theres integration under the hood, how easy is it to pull things
 > from the Z-ODB from outside. I believe people have posted stuff
 > on how to do this from python. But will it limit developers to using 
 > python in the future.

I don't really understand where you're going here, but I can't see the
limitation.  As I said above Zope provides adapters for php and perl
development.  Moving the dataset to an RDBMS would require and object
relational mapper.  Such tools do exist although they are designed
more for using an RDBMS while retaining an object model more so than
transferring an existing dataset to an RDBMS.

 > That is one advantage of sticking to MySQL for the plant database, 
 > interms that basically every language can communicate relativly 
 > painlessly with it.

As I've said before Zope can talk to any RDBMS as well.

Richard have you really thought about the kind of database schema it
would require to implement relationships the way we have been talking
about?  If you really think that MySQL is the way to go we can always
use it as the database instead of ZODB.  I personally think this is a
completely lossy idea.

Chad

-- 
Chad Knepp
python -c 'import base64;print base64.decodestring("cHlnQGdhbGF0ZWEub3Jn")'