Hi Fred, I read the serialization proposal... yours is somewhere inbetween what we have now and where I think we're heading. I really like the format of your proposals! These should definitely go up on the fishbowl. One thing that I think is important for a FS serialization strategy is that the filesystem representation of objects should be as simple as possible to work with. This means that the filesystem representation of a PythonScript should look like a Python script, that the filesystem representation of a DTML method should look as much as possible like a normal HTML document, etc. Instead of relying on a single monolithic format for fs reps of Zope objects (e.g. one expressed in XML), I think each object should be able to determine its own serialization to filesystem. Properties and security settings of each object could be expressed in the contents of a separate file (e.g. a "resource fork" in Mac terminology, I guess) which would be related to the actual content via a naming convention. Tres Seaver has done some work on this with his FSDump product (http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/FSDump), although it only goes "one way" at the moment, and Steve Spicklemire has gone a slightly different route with his ZCVSMixin product (http://www.zope.org/Members/sspickle/ZCVSMixin/). I have a proposal up on the Digital Creations intranet which makes the proposal to leave serialization format up to each object, and gives some info about possible implementation strategies. I need to clean it up and move it over to the fishbowl at some point, but I hope this email serves as a sort of overview about what we want to do about the problem at DC... it'd be great to be able to conserve resources and work on the same problem together. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Fred Wilson Horch" <fhorch@ecoaccess.org> To: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com> Cc: <zope-dev@zope.org> Sent: Sunday, March 11, 2001 11:30 PM Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] FTP interface being worked on?
Hi Chris,
You wrote in part:
The "export as files" paradigm is something we'd really like to see soon
in
Zope. [...] I'd be interested in seeing your proposal too.
Great to hear we're thinking alike. My proposals are available on our SourceForge site (sorry for the long URL -- I can send the proposals as an attachment if you'd prefer):
FTP proposal
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/proposals/ftp_access/ftp_acces s_prop.txt?rev=1.2&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=ecoaccess
XML-RPC proposal (export as files)
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/proposals/xml_rpc/xml_rpc_prop .txt?rev=1.1&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=ecoaccess
The best place for these sorts of things are at http://dev.zope.org (the "fishbowl")...
Okay, I'll take a look and submit my proposals through the Fishbowl process.
Thanks, Fred
-- Fred Wilson Horch mailto:fhorch@ecoaccess.org Executive Director, EcoAccess http://ecoaccess.org/ P.O. Box 2823, Durham, NC 27715-2823 phone: 919.419-8354