[Zope-PTK] cross-portal access to objects (was: Discussions in PTK)

[Andrew Wilcox]

At 03:08 PM 2/16/00 -0500, Mike Pelletier wrote:
>    Where do these objects go?  I would like to keep everything owned by a
>Member somewhere within their personal space (which is their Member
>folder).

Bzzzupt!!!  I read this, and it triggered something of a brainstorm.  I
have no idea how it would be implemented, but here goes :-) :-)

Yes, I agree, I would want everything I created (such as discussion
postings) to be in my own personal space.  But would my personal space
*have to* reside on that particular portal system?  Suppose I have own Zope
space (let's say I'm getting it through my ISP).  Wow, wouldn't it be neat
if everything I created, all the discussions etc. I participated in among
all the Zope-based portals out there, were really saved and indexed in my
own personal space?

Imagine what it would mean if one Zope portal could reference objects in
another Zope portal.  Things like news syndication, for example.  Rather
creating a special RSS type interface, just make your news item objects
available to the portals who want to publish your news.

Somehow Zope would keep a local copy of the object behind the scenes, so
that it could serve it up fast, but would get notified of changes.
(Something like ZEO, perhaps? :))

And, no doubt a portal might want to add its own code and methods to portal
objects; but if it did it carefully by subclassing a global-aware
ZDiscussion class, it could still publish and reference pure ZDiscussion
objects to/from other portals.

Oouff, back to work!

Andrew