[Zope-dev] FTP interface being worked on?

[Chris McDonough]

Fred,

I've put the proposal up at
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/RepresentingObjectsOnTheFilesyst
em.

Let me know what you think!

- C

----- Original Message -----
From: "Fred Wilson Horch" <fhorch@ecoaccess.org>
To: "Chris McDonough" <chrism@digicool.com>
Cc: <zope-dev@zope.org>
Sent: Monday, March 12, 2001 11:32 AM
Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] FTP interface being worked on?


> Hi Chris,
>
> Thanks for the pointers to the work others have done.  You wrote in
> part:
>
> > Tres Seaver has done some work on this with his FSDump product
> > (http://www.zope.org/Members/tseaver/FSDump), although it only goes "one
> > way" at the moment, and Steve Spicklemire has gone a slightly different
> > route with his ZCVSMixin product
> > (http://www.zope.org/Members/sspickle/ZCVSMixin/).
>
> I will take a look at these.  I see they are both Zope Products.
>
> I had not planned to write a Product, but maybe I should reconsider.
> For the FTP interface, I had planned to hack on the Zope internals
> directly.  And for the XML-RPC interface, I had planned to write a
> separate client that could leverage the XML-RPC support already built
> into Zope.
>
> >  I have a proposal up on the Digital Creations intranet which makes the
> > proposal to leave serialization format up to each object, and gives some
> > info about possible implementation strategies.
>
> Get that proposal in the Fishbowl! ;-)
>
> I wonder if yet another interface is really required.  If you think
> about it, isn't the FTP interface basically a file system serialization
> format?  All objects already support the FTP interface -- if we improve
> it, then conceivably we can use standard FTP mirroring tools for
> filesystem export and import.
>
> Another serialized format that all Zope objects support is the XML
> interface, which exposes all the objects' guts.  With XML-RPC I
> envisioned being able to improve on the FTP interface by adding things
> like md5 checksums to determine if the local and remote objects are in
> synch.  I haven't looked too deeply, but presumably via XML you could
> support all of the management functionality that is currently provided
> by the HTML management interface.  So you could build a client with a
> rich feature set for managing Zope objects.
>
> I understand your point about having each object's serialization "look
> like" that kind of object, but isn't there also some value in the
> consistency of XML representing every kind of object?  For automated
> tools, it seems like an XML representation is a great idea, and one that
> could be exploited with a good client-side tool that understands the
> Zope ODB DTD.
>
> So I basically see three interfaces as necessary and sufficient:
>
> 1) XHTML - gets you started, can manage things with a browser
> 2) FTP   - serialization to and from a filesystem
> 3) XML   - the advanced management interface, easy to automate
>
> I don't know much about WebDAV -- since we're a volunteer organization,
> we are using free software where possible and I haven't seen much free
> software that supports WebDAV.  cadaver seems to work fine with Zope.
> But I can easily see the combination of FTP + CVS providing us
> everything we need.  So in some ways WebDAV seems like an extra that
> will be nice if and when there are clients that support it.
>
> > I hope this email serves as a sort of overview
> > about what we want to do about the problem at DC... it'd be great to be
able
> > to conserve resources and work on the same problem together.
>
> Absolutely!  We liked your Fishbowl process so much we are basing our
> own development process on it.  (For details of our process, check out
>
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/docs/tech-process.txt?rev=1.2&
content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=ecoaccess
> )
> --
> Fred Wilson Horch mailto:fhorch@ecoaccess.org
> Executive Director, EcoAccess http://ecoaccess.org/
> P.O. Box 2823, Durham, NC 27715-2823 phone: 919.419-8354
>
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