[Zope-DB] Re: Relational Databases in Zope 2 and Zope 3

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Chris,

> Several people have commented on the rather archeic state of affairs of 
> the standards for RDB integration in Zope 2. There's also Zope 3 to 
> think about.
> 
> How is RDB integration currently supported in Zope 3?

There's not much out-of-the-box. Since Zope3 integrates much better with 
pure-Python solutions, I think it will be more common to use 
object-relational mappers such as SQLObjects rather than hacking your 
own SQLMethods. We still have those around, in the form of 'SQLScripts', 
but they are content objects and meant for scripters.

Sidnei has implemented a rather big application using Zope3 and 
SQLObject. The small glue code that was necessary is now open source 
(ZPL) at the z3 base, http://codespeak.net/z3, svn under 
http://codespeak.net/svn/z3/sqlos/trunk.

Using SQLObject, relational data meets Zope3 as content objects. You can 
use simply use Zope3 schemas to describe your data (shouldn't be too 
hard to model those when you've already got a relational schema ;)) and 
you can, of course, register views and adapter for those objects just 
like they were persistent...

> What are the possibilities for a new standard for RDB integration in 
> Zope 2?

Maybe we can facilitate some stuff there with Five, but I think the 
overall acquisition and persistency stuff will come back and bite us in 
the arse...

> How can these two worlds be brought to meet, and should we be seeking to 
> do so?

Note sure that that is really necessary. New projects could be starting 
with Zope3 already now, I think. sqlos is running in production and is 
therefore probably more mature than, say, Zope3's indexing machinery ;).

Philipp