On Wed, 15 Mar 2000, Ragnar Beer wrote:
Hello Zopistas out there!
It also came to my mind that I might be missing an important feature of Zope: ZODB. For some reason (lack of marketing?) I just didn't realize that there is a database behind Zope that I could use to store my stuff. Last night I read some documentation but I have some questions left open:
Can I access ZODB via TCP/IP socket to retrieve data for statistical calculations?
If you are not planning of storing thousands of forms and have them accessed by many users/per second then ZODB is really a good solution and it is *easy* too use. For example (in the simplest case) you can design a ZClass that contains all the required fields and a form for the clients to fill. A method can instantiate the ZClass in a folder and add the parameters provided by the customer and thats about it in terms of simple storage. You can have a method that returns the data in some convenient format as a text file which you can then input into your favorite stat package. Or you can get fancier and build an xmlrpc method in your stat package if it supports xmlrpc (ie if your stat package is a set of perl programs) and get the data directly into your package, or get even fancier and incorporate your statistical analysis routines inside your Zope product, but I am getting carried away here :-) (and yes it is doable, it has been done and if you decide to take this route I have some PCA routines in python you might want)
Actually I'm not planning anything except to be prepared. I'm only starting and have no idea what I will end up with. So of course I am looking for a scalable solution. From what I've learned from the list scalability seems to be a weak spot of Zope (while e.g. the latest Enhydra includes a failover solution). I have no idea how much ZEO costs. (People from DC could you help here? I couldn't find a price on the website.) I tried to understand ZClasses and read the documentation a couple of times but it didn't help a lot. So now I'm using Python classes which is very easy (maybe only because it's better documented). Can you e.g. simply add a dictionary or a list of dictionaries to a ZClass and access each element individually? Would be nice if I could get back to you some time later to talk about the PCA. :) Ragnar