newbie: Zope

[Andrew Kuchling]

cobrien at Radix.Net (Cary O'Brien) writes:
> Hmm...  What's wrong with external methods for this stuff?  My
> understanding (from reading the zope mailing list for a while) was
> that SOP was to implement things with external methods when things
> got too hairy for DTML/ZClasses, and to store data in an RDBMS when
> the system had lots of writes.  External methods live in text files,

External methods are insufficient for our needs, because the code will
want to return HTML back to the user; now you either start embedding
HTML in external method code (bad) or the methods call other methods
implemented in DTML.  The external methods and DTML pages then become
tangled together and it's hard to understand.

Now, let me point out that our application is uncommonly complex, and
I haven't seen a development system that would do a better job with
it.  The MEMS Exchange has complex objects in complex combinations,
but 90% of Web applications have simple objects interwoven fairly
simply:

	* Yahoo and dmoz.org are trees of objects, where the most
common object is simply a tuple of (URL, sitename, description).

	* Message boards, from Slashdot to scripting.com to advogato,
have message objects, with a few cross-message links for
threading responses.

	* Many sites use objects that are simply collections of
attributes, bags of data.  Freshmeat's application entries
are bags of data.  So are SourceForge's bug reports and
patches, ebay's auction items, or Amazon's books.

I think Zope *is* fairly well suited for these sorts of problems.
I just don't work in that region of the problem space.

--amk