On Fri, 5 Mar 1999, Paul Everitt wrote:

Tony wrote: [...]

...

h) We also need resources such as QuickTime movies, images PowerPoint slides etc. to be uploaded - would they sit in the database or can they be held somewhere else (and what happens about file name conflicts)?

We put them in the database. The 3 Mb Zope binaries are served out of the database, the PDF files are served out of the database. This works so well I don't even think about it any more.

Would you address the "to be uploaded" aspect. Unfortunately, from the Zope POV, not all information formatters are written on Python. I certainly don't want to reinvent wheels. As a result, I need to do automatic dynamic replacement of content. "Including" a file which has been generated by the external program is certainly easier probably more efficient than generating the file, importing a copy into the database, and serving it from there. Mentally, I look at a file system as an implementation of a database which has structured keys and is efficient at supplying large "results" (the file) from the (path) key. Perhaps we should implement file access through such a model.