Giuseppe Bonelli wrote at 2003-1-24 11:20 +0100:
I want to use Zope as the persistent storage for a big number of instances of a python class inherited from UserList and I ask advice to this list's wisdom on the best strategy to use. .... I see 2 alternatives: 1. Store them as XMLDocument instances (from XMLKit) and use ParsedXML and XMLTransform to build a search and display UI using XSLTs. 2. Store them using their native python structure and build from scratch a dtml search and display UI. I would go for 2.
XML processing in (pure) Python is very slow. When you go for XML, you should consider "libxml/libxslt" or (maybe) "4xslt" (the FourThought XSLT processor; when I last used it about 18 month before, it was still incredibly slow; but great progress had been reported ...)
Main advantage of 2. should be performance (no extra xml layer), but standard Zope objects don't seems (at least as far I Know) to permit an easy implementation of hierarchies of UserList-like properties and I would like to maintain a 1 object for each class instance approach. On the other hand, the xml approach seems natural because of the hierarchical nature of the class, but I am worried about performance issues due to the extra xml layer. Why do you think that?
I do not see any problem for nested "UserList" attributes. However, they cannot be mapped to properties. This means, you must do the UI yourself. Dieter