Online database implementations

[Paul Winkler]

Hi,

I need advice and/or working code for putting together a 
user-maintained web-based database. Something very much akin to the
Vaults of Parnassus - code for which is NOT available... I asked.
:-(  Tim-o'-the-Vaults said his code is so messy that he doesn't
want to release it and he thinks it would take me less time to write
my own.

I want my database to be:

--searchable

--browsable by categories

--up and running with a minimum of work (yeah right).

--have a web interface for users to add/update entries without my
intervention

I've searched the vaults for online CGI database systems, and
haven't found anything ready-made in python, though I do see a lot
of tools I could make use of...

Another good example of the kind of thing I wantt to do is at
http://www.happypenguin.org/ but the author of that site says,
again, his code is a mess. Plus it's written in Perl, not my first
choice.

What about Zope? Is there Zope code to do this kind of thing? If so,
are there any zope hosts who will provide free hosting for a project
like this?

I notice that both Parnassus and the linux game tome use an SQL
server as the back-end and have a web interface to that. This would
slow me down a bit since I don't know SQL and would have to learn it
first! I'm wondering if that's really necessary for a database of
about 1000 items (currently growing maybe 3% per month) that doesn't
change very much (probably only a few updates or additions per day).
Couldn't I just make a class for database entries, and pickle them?
Will this be enormously slower to search and access? Will it run
like a dog if the database swells to 10,000 items? What if I
generate static HTML pages from the database, and only use CGI for
updating the database, and regenerate the html files when changes
are entered? This would reduce the speed requirements for the
database engine, and could make browsing faster for the user since
pages could be cached by the browser. Also it would  simplify
mirroring the site.

The site I want to use this for is at http://sound.condorow.net/ and
is currently maintained by hand, by the heroic Dave Phillips.


-- 
................    paul winkler    ..................
slinkP arts:   music, sound, illustration, design, etc.
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