[Gsoc] Introspector projects

[Rafael Oliveira]

Hello,

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 12:23 PM, Uli Fouquet <uli at gnufix.de> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
>  we all might have noticed the glut of 'introspector' related projects
>  planned this year :-)
>
> [snip]
>
>  As I am not a mentor, I might haven't seen all 'introspector' related
>  projects yet and became aware of the fact, that also other students
>  could not see my own application proposal. I therefore put it on
>
>    http://wiki.zope.org/gsoc/SummerOfCode2008/GrokIntrospector
>
>  and added a link in the zope GSOC2008 wiki page. Maybe other students
>  that didn't it yet, want to publish their applications as well. Or is
>  there already a place, where one can see the applications without being
>  a mentor?

I did the same as you, now there's a link to my application at
http://wiki.zope.org/gsoc/SummerOfCode2008/

>  Until now I counted three projects with 'introspection' related targets:
>  [snip]
>
>  - Rafael Oliveira proposed a project for browsing the ZODB with a
>   graphical (wxpython-based) client.
>
>   This project seems to focus on the ZODB only (i.e. not on component
>   registry) and an external client.

Exactly. I would like to depend only on ZODB. Among other reasons, I
think ZODB has potential to be more used standalone outside the Zope
world, on any kind of app. Many projects can benefit from using a
truly OO DB rather then relational DB + OR mapping tools and I believe
such a tool can help on that.

>  - My own proposal is focused on Grok and wants to provide both, a ZODB
>   browser as well as a component registry browser.
>  [snip]

>   Furthermore it wants to provide first simple possibilities to change
>   values in the ZODB/registry where appropriate.

This would be a big plus for my proposal, but I avoided it because it
may be hard to implement on the time frame we have for GSoC.

>  Because a well-thought Grok-introspector should examine and display also
>  things, that are relevant in non-Grok-environments like plain Zope2 or
>  Plone, a common base library might be helpful.
>  [snip]

I must admit I'm a little bit confused about your ideas for the common
base library. Perhaps it's because I'm a newbie on everything related
to Zope3 (however I've been working a lot with Zope2 and Python). So,
if I missed something that can be applied directly to my proposal
please tell me.

Regarding the overlapping between your project and mine: since
zodbbrowser has a desktop GUI and Grok-introspector a Web one tied do
Grok, there's not much we can reuse between the 2 projects on the UI
side. However, I think the common part would be a library that helps
one to read data from a ZODB and prepare it for displaying. This
library would include also things like calculating object sizes and
searching (I proposed search for objects IDs and/or values for
zodbbrowser).

It seems your "common base library" idea is one level above the "zodb
browser library" I've just described.

I think if we have the chance to work on these projects we should
definitely try to work together on something reusable between both
ZODB browsers.

What are your opinions on this ? Am I missing something ?

Regards,
-- 
Rafael Bruno Cavalhero de Oliveira <rafaelbco at gmail.com>
Analista de Sistemas - Paradigma <http://www.paradigma.com.br>
Mestrando em Ciência da Informação - UFMG
http://rafaelb.objectis.net