Hey all! I recently returned from the IEEE Metadata '99 meeting, and had some thoughts that I nned to share with the Zope developers. First off, I did a little evangelism, recomending scripting in general and Zope/Python in particular where ever I could :-) One particular case involves a software/data archive at a NASA. Under the title "Smart Data, Dump Archive", they've come up wit some thing they call 'buckets' that serve to contain data and associated software to act on that data, that can be moved around between archives, and is accessed through the web. Hmm, sounds like WWW enabled objects with methods, doesn't it? Where have I heard this before? They are currently hand crafting perl/CGI to do all this, so I recommended a look-see at Zope. The one piece they're looking for that Zope doesn't do well right now is the packaging everything up and moving it around part. Mostly because of the 'fear of pickles' issue - err, I mean 'fear of arbitrary foreign code'. A second point from the meeting was about interoperability. The general concensus was "Standards, Standards, Standards, oh and then some more Standards". Admitedly, there's more standards than you can shake a stick at covering all aspects of something like this, but the one application I though of was ZServer. My understanding is that it is ZServer's job to provide different "views" of the ZopeBase (err, what was the agreed on term for this?). One of design issues around the FTP view is what to do with attributes and methods of docs. One suggestion was an XML doc, containing the extra info. All that 'extra info' is what the whole meeting was about, namely Metadata! There exists now a proposal to the OMG (Object Managent Group - the CORBA people) to fold aspects of UML into XML and call it XMI - XML Metadata Interchange. It's a little verbose (what commitee standard isn't?) but there are working implementations in use in the database world, allowing exchange of object schemas and such between different vendors tools. Take a look at: http://www.oasis-open.org/cover/xmi.html an archived version of the announcement of the modified proposal: http://www.omg.org/archives/orbos/msg00702.html To quote IBM (one of the submittees) on the proposal: "The main purpose of XMI is to enable easy interchange of metadata between modeling tools (based on the OMG UML) and between tools and metadata repositories (OMG MOF based) in distributed heterogeneous environments. XMI integrates three key industry standards: 1) XML - eXtensible Markup Language, a W3C standard; 2) UML - Unified Modeling Language, an OMG modeling standard; 3) MOF - Meta Object Facility and OMG modeling and metadata repository standard."
From Zope's point of view, it provides an standard DTD creating an XML representation of the ZopeBase.
HTH, Ross -- Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer Computer and Information Technology Institute Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005