[Zope-dev] More comments on ZPatterns

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 10:02 AM 7/10/00 -0400, Shane Hathaway wrote:
>Phillip,
>
>What if the management interface for specialists provided a way to
>manipulate, or at least view, the table of virtual objects (or, in
>ZPatterns-speak, DataSkins)?  Wouldn't that make ZPatterns more
>accessible?

Probably.  The sticking points are twofold, however.  1) I'm not sure what
a default for such an interface would look like, and so am holding off
until Ty and I have built a couple of ones for "real life" use.  2) I need
a good way to make the methods overrideable without any subclassing
(whether in Python or ZClasses), since Specialists "want to be singletons".
 I have an idea about how to make Specialist and similar ObjectManagers
able to permit adding of attributes that they already have, so long as it's
a *class* attribute and not a manage_* method, but I haven't had time to
implement it yet.  If ObjectManagers did this themselves (wink wink, nudge
nudge) it would lift a lot of restrictions I'm currently holding to with
regard to default interfaces on Specialists, Racks, UserSources, etc.,
because then users could override them at a whim.

I think this may relate to an existing interest of yours regarding
specification of interfaces and overriding them in instances; I'd be
interested in hearing your comments regardless.