Chas wrote:

Just wondering if anyone has thought about personalization services based on Zope ?

PTK.

The most obvious/traditional approach seems to be : 1. Acquire user information (via forms/surveys/transaction-histories etc) and store in RDB. 2. When the user comes to the site (and either logs in or is identified by IP or cookie), query the RDB for customized content or appropriate products.

OK, no magic there. But it's not very scalable in terms of : a) Load. We can keep shoving Zope servers on the front end but the RDB is going to get hammered if this has to occur for each and every request.

This isn't necessarily true. Zope caches objects, and the scenario you describe is well suited to the caching strategy. (That is, a user is probably going to come back again within a minute of their previous request.) Compare this to an RDBMS strategy where state is always being retrieved on each request.

b) Development. A more object-oriented approach would be nicer. eg. Personalities with behaviours and properties. Could a pool of persistent personalities be left floating around ? (No, this is not an early April's fool)

The PTK membership model allows arbitrary extension of methods and attributes. --Paul