You told us that you will be refining Zope 2.6 plan. ProposedFeatures table contains an " Implement links (object references)" entry by Mario Valente. I've created SoftLink proposal in ProposalsWiki . These works appear related. We (Mario and me) discussed and decided that we can dedicate some efforts to make it working (Mario has working code already). The plan is to release Patch-like product for Zope 2.3, 2.4 and 2.5 to get feedback. And to incorporate functionality into Zope 2.6 without patching functionality.
Please give us your recommendations / feedback / instructions for us,
To be honest, I'm a little worried about the approach. Links can be very, very hard to get right (which is why they are not in the core now), especially with regard to security issues. Creating an object that "impersonates" another object is tough, because there a potentially unknown number of contracts that the impersonator must fulfill. This usually leads to problems :( For the SoftLink proposal in particular, the main problem you note in the proposal is that you want to avoid 404's when people go to a resource that has been moved. It seems to me that the best way to address that problem is to have a "RedirectObject" that you could add with the name of the object that was moved. It would _not_ try to impersonate the moved object, but when you went to "view" the object, you would be automatically redirected to the new location. That would avoid a lot of the problems of the link approach, with little overhead. Note that I'm not saying that object links are not a valid requirement, but it sounds like the problem you want to solve is definitely different than Mario's. In many ways, the "correct" required behavior of a link depends on what you expect to be able to do with it (the problem you are trying to solve). I can easily imagine that "right" behavior of a link if your main goal is to avoid 404s will _not_ be right if you are using the link in other ways. For example, if you went to a URL that had been moved, what is the right "context" that it should render itself in? I highly suspect that the right context is the place that it was moved to, rather than the context where the link lives (redirect semantics). That is basically the opposite of another possible usage of a link, where you would want to use the link to "virtually include" an object into a different context. I submit that trying to do both is too complex and probably too insecure as well (as managers of security would have to evaluate N possible security scenarios, most of which are not readily visible to them at the time they are setting up security). I think that the "RedirectObject" approach could sidestep all of these issues and provide an incremental step while still solving your problem. Brian Lloyd brian@zope.com V.P. Engineering 540.361.1716 Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com