On Mon, 20 Mar 2000, Joachim Werner wrote:
Yes, I save the state of the boxes with their properties. Where else should an object save its state? I mean, "state" IS a property of the object. In terms of object orientation, this seems to me to be a much more logical design than to save session stuff in some non-zope external database or file.
Yes, what I didn't know about your design was that the objects in question were specific to the user. In that case, and if it is not expected that the user will want to change his settings with every session but instead this is a customization feature, then what you have described sounds like an ideal application of Zope and its object machinery.
O.k., my ZODB might grow, but is it really that much of a problem (I mean, a problem that can not be solved by just packing the DB once in a while)? Any experience with that out there?
I think it all depends on how frequent the updates are and how many users you have. If your site gets to be high enough traffic and users make frequent enough changes for it to be a problem, you could always switch to an undo-less backing store for the ZODB and therefore not have to change your implementation to continue to scale. Others with direct experience with portal-like sites may have more useful input. Are you, by the way, aware of the Portal Toolkit project? I haven't investigated it yet, but if you aren't following it it sounds like something you'd be interested in. I'm sure they are thinking about scalability issues there. --RDM