[Zope-CMF] Understanding Tool Construction

[Edward Muller]

The credit card gateway would be one tool and the shopping cart would be
another tool. I need to learn that english thing ....

On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 14:04, Edward Muller wrote:
> A lot of what I am doing will be e-commerce based 'stuff' that needs to
> fit into an existing plone site.
> 
> Based on the what I saw and how I thought it was being used I figured
> certain portions of what I needed to write would be be done as a tool.
> For instance I think it makes sense to have a credit card gateway a
> shopping cart tool. The actual items in the cart would be content types
> and the way the cart would be displayed would be a skin. But the methods
> for manipulating the cart, saving it, restoring it at later visits,
> associating it with Members, etc would be the tool.
> 
> Which brings up another question.... :-)
> 
> I was thinking of making customers members of the site, but the default
> install of plone at least (and possibly cmf) allows members to create
> and publish content. While my customers would want some members to be
> able to publish content on the whole site and some others to be able to
> add content to their private spaces, they won't want customers to be
> able to add much beyond product reviews and possibly trouble tickets.
> 
> Any suggestions for hacking that up, or is it already in there...I just
> need to create the roles and adjust/assign permissions/create new ones.
> 
> On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 06:09, Tres Seaver wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-08-04 at 06:41, Chris Withers wrote:
> > 
> > > > Okay, then what is a tool for then? 
> > > 
> > > Providing a generic service that is required for all types of CMF site.
> > > 
> > > As a general rule of thumb, most of the good candidates for tools have already 
> > > been implemented ;-)
> > 
> > Chris, your imagination is too limited here:  the existing tools cover
> > only a small slice of possible services / utilities.  On my current
> > project, we have added several *dozen* tools, of different flavors.  The
> > key difference between skin methods and tools is that tools often do
> > "heavy lifting", and hence need to be unit tested, as well as running as
> > "trusted code".
> > 
> > To address Edward's original question:
> > 
> > Many tools can be prototyped as a folder full of external methods: the
> > skin templates / methods which call them won't know or care the
> > difference.  If the tool needs persistent state (e.g., a relationship
> > service :), then it gets built that way from scratch.  Once the tool
> > gels, write an interface for it, and ensure that the clients depend only
> > on that interface, to allow easy replacement later.
> > 
> > Tres.
-- 
Edward Muller

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