Rowan Hick wrote:
Okay so I'm getting into this whole Zope deal, and from what I have seen so far it looks pretty darned good, I like the OO concept, but with it it poses a few design issues for websites / web applications
Traditionally all data is stored in some form of relational database, and then the scripts pull it back out again. Now we all know and hate relational databases (well I do anyway as I'm a child of the information age - learning in OO concepts and then having to go back to a relational database) but they are remarkably good for what they do - storing large amounts of data and allowing you to retrieve it in a quick and relatively painless manner, if you get your head around SQL.
Note there are also OO extension to RDBMSs (e.g. Oracle) and Postgres has also some concepts implemented.
Now Zope comes along with the ability to create and persist objects without the need for a relational database. Wooohooo... all my prayers have been answered, or have they?.
Well it uses it's own database anyways :-)
Q1. Has anyone tried to build webapplications with large (maybe into the 10's of thousands) numbers of Zope objects? [skiped - no idea ] Q2. How much more or less efficient is Zope for storing a piece of data over a traditional relational database ? Even a ``traditional'' database may be good to store object w/ a little logic. Also, I dunno much about the data types definitions in Postgres but I know you can define your own types, so why not to try to define class-like type where methods are triggers (just a thought) Of course a DB design specially for this purpose will fit much better.
Q3 (I'm a newbie here) Can a python external method access Zope objects ? Eg if I create a task object from a ZClass can I then do things with it from a python script?
I am a newbie too :-) but learning fast cause python looks very easy itself.
From what I know so far, yes.
Q4. I think I remember seeing a post about the Zope database being a single large file posing problems with the Linux filesystem.. or was that the windows filesystem.. if so then that could limit Zope's potential in a commercial production enviroment, surely ?? If this is true what have people done to try and get around this, ie archiving objects (however that could occur) etc.. ?
IIRC that is a limit for the ext2 file system. There may be other Linux FSs that don't have this limit. Also I've heard ext3 is about to come wich I guess/hope won't have this limit anymore. -- CIMPOESU Teodor, Web Programmer @ DIGICOM S.A. Bucharest, Romania @ Internet, site development @ teo@digiro.net , +(401)-330.47.28 official home page ~ http://www.digiro.net/ Internet web page ~ http://internet.digiro.net/