Hello all,
I was showing off Zope the other day to a workmate (he's a graphic artist type) and he said "hey that's cool" (yeah, zclasses and zcatalog are cool :-)) then he asked: I wonder if zope can handle stuff like serving mp3 and streaming media like real-audio, flash...?
Err...yeah, that'd be cool too, I guess. But is that possible? How difficult would such a beast (or beasts) be? Thoughts? Ideas?
(Now I just _know_ someone's going to announce - in a couple of hours - a realmedia zclass v0.0.1, right? ;-))
We have been doing some thinking about the low-level ZServer architecture lately with an eye toward making large downloads less resource-intensive. The Zope and ZServer underpinnings were designed in such a way that they did not *prevent* us from implementing low-impact streaming - but the actual support for it is not there yet. Hopefully this won't expose my ignorance about streaming media (oops, I just did it, didn't I?), but isn't the effectiveness of streaming mostly a question of connection quality between the client and server? In my understanding, if a client were to request a big mp3, it would get loaded into memory as an object (with a non-trivial footprint). Zope would then start pushing the data back down the pipe to the client. The "streaming media" client would basically cache a certain amount of the incoming data and try to play and keep the buffer filled. If this is the case, the only problem (from Zope's point of view) is that large objects have to get loaded into memory, which would be a problem for sites that made heavy use of such things. The architecure thinking that we are doing will eventually solve that problem. In the interim, unless you are doing something really out there (like dynamically generating mp3s) you could probably save a lot of time and worry by just making the big mondo files available from a normal web server and linking to them. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com