Terry Hancock wrote:
In my research of online collaborative systems I frequently see references to MOO or MUD based systems. After some reading on the subject, it seems to me that the Zope OFS could be considered a MOO -- or at least very much like one.
What (if anything) would a MOO server system be more adept than a Zope server at? And would it be logical to emulate MOO-based technologies using Zope OFS as the database?
Here's my two cents on this topic, just because MOO and Zope are the two coolest environments I've used in the past decade. What follows is probably not going to win any technical merit awards: At some abstract level, the MOO server and the Zope server can be considered equivalent, because they're both OO systems (both as databases and as message-handling servers). At this level, anything sufficiently OO would qualify -- you ought to try out a similar query over on the Squeak-Smalltalk list, where they also have totally OO-based web/netservers. The real difference is that MOO and Zope have been specialized for different kinds of tasks: Zope gives you the scaffolding of an object model that makes ton of sense for a "webmaster" kind of approach. MOO gave you an object model specialized for 'location'-specific real-time interaction. The extent to which these two systems have been specialized to different ends means they would in practice suck at each other's tasks. I remember in the mid-90s there were lots of projects trying to get the MOOserver to serve webpages, and it was a simple enough thing to do, conceptually (you pretend the browser is a 'player' and deal with it conversationally). But is sucked in practice, for reasons of speed and, to a certain extent, conceptual clarity: the metaphor only went so far before getting in the way. My expectation is that trying to get Zope to work as a real-time server would be similarly frustrating, just because you'd be working against the main current of what it has evolved into. The conceptual overlap in them that you point out here, though, is a very neat intellectual space, and I'd suggest you look into Squeak and Smalltalk, the current manifestation of the common ancestor of both MOO and Zope. Squeak is still green enough to be bent in pretty much any direction, so if you've got ideas about novel communications models, it's probably a more fruitful environment, just by virtue of having less of an established set of practices governing its trajectory. - John Maxwell http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/People/jmax jmax@sfu.ca