[Zope-dev] Introspection, managing External Methods?

[Martijn Faassen]

Robin Becker wrote:
> 
> Are there any plans to upgrade the External Methods product to allow
> remote management ie creation/deletion/modification of the file texts? I
> ask because a major advantage of Zope is the ability to manage at a
> distance and this is not possible for External Methods. I can see easy
> fudges using a hack of fsimport, but something based on the existing
> external methods would be better.

The scary thing is that External Methods can do anything with the Zope
database (or even other parts of your computer). So someone could
accidentally or maliciously write an External Method that does something
bad.

There has been some talk about creating a scripting object that could
contain Python code instead. This Python would then have to use the Zope
built-in
security mechanisms to ensure it can't do anything evil. This would be a
rather
marvellous thing to have, in my opinion.

> More generally how can one upgrade a Zope product remotely; assuming
> this were possible it would be nice to be able to remotely shut down
> Zope and get it to restart.

With ZClasses, as long as no External Methods are used in them, the
first can be done. On auto restarting Zope, I thought that at least on
some platforms Zope could be shut down from a distance. A restart will
then happen automatically. At least, I think it works like this under
Unix.

Regards,

Martijn