Matt, Thanks for the quick reply! As far as the modules are concerned, I read quickly through it, but I'm just concerned about the security implications. The module I need to work with for instance takes a config file as input, normally from the file system. This has been disabled by default for obvious secuity reasons, will I be able to get around it? Actually, if I use Zope specific methods, I suppose I should be able to open the file and pass the object to the module's method instead of the file name and it should work ok? th efurthest I got was to import the module, if I didn't get security errors, I got prompted for passwords, but even the admin password wasn't working, not sure what I was doing wrong, I'm probably moving a bit too fast on this :) As for the database, you have the entore site going on PostgreSQL ? That's what I'd like to do eventually as well. I noticed you can create "connection objects" and so on, but I'd prefer storing the ENTIRE site in an efficient database if possible. I'd be inetersted to know how they go about storing large images in PostgreSQL though, I guess you need post 7.1 in order to have TOAST ? Other binary type objects are just BLOBs I suppose ? If you can point me to any docs concerning this I'd love to see them :) Thanks, J.F.

---------- From: Matt Hand[SMTP:matt@bitflip.com] Sent: Friday, August 24, 2001 5:05 PM To: Doyon, Jean-Francois Subject: Re: [Zope] Newbie questions

Jean-Francois,

I'm no guru, but I'll try to help where I can.

On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 04:48:18PM -0400, Doyon, Jean-Francois wrote:

...

Hello,

- My main issue is the integration of a python module (MapServer) into Zope. This is a module compiled using SWIG, which ends up with a .py, .pyc and .so file. I've allready tried, quickly importing this module but without success, I guess I will have to learn more about the security framework of Zope. The big thing is access to the file system. Can I allow it in any way? Can I trick the module into using Zope Objects instead of the file system? Or can I override the default built-in security provisions that prevent such access? This is crucial to me. The said module reads a variety of data from the file system normally, and I need a way to make it work under Zope. I'm allready quite familair with it's perl version.

You'll need to create a python module which passes calls to and from Zope and place it the /path/to/zope/Extensions directory. See the Zope Book at www.zope.org for proper syntax in order to import the method into Zope (External Method). I use external methods to access a PostgreSQL database and an xmlrpc server and return the results to a dtml document or method.

...

- The database where basic content of the site is kept, how stable is it? How big a site can it hold? I noticed that the entire site seems to live within one file. The current, standard HTMl/Filesystem site takes around 600MB, how robust is the Zope storage back-end? What about performance with large sites?

The installed database seems pretty stable and makes rolling back transactions very easy; however, I use a Postgres database for production work and use Zope as a front end. It was a little trickier to set up than I'd anticipated, but with some digging and a little help from the zope-list I got it up and running nicely.

I hope this helped a little.

Matt Hand matt@bitflip.com