[Zope-dev] ZTables and/or Catalog plugable brains?

[Martijn Faassen]

Jay, Dylan wrote:
[snip]
> Also in my searches I came across lots of references to something called
> ZTables. This seems to be a Catalog with a UI that is about lots of tabular
> information (rather than a ZCatalog which is specialized to replicating and
> indexing existing objects). Is this dead?

I got the impression that it is. It's probably not been updated for
a long time; I think not even to Zope 2, but I may be mistaken.

> If not where is it?

It was never released as open source, so it isn't floating around except
probably at Zope Corporation somewhere.

> If so, why? It seems like a really good idea to me.
> It seems to be there are times when objects (esp ZClasses) are too heavy? 

Obviously ZClasses are heavy, but tabular data in Python goes in some
kind of object anyway, so it's rather hard to avoid *objects*, unless you use
some external database. MetaKit has a nice Python interface and is lightweight,
for instance. I haven't heard of anyone integrating it with Zope yet,
though:

  http://www.equi4.com/metakit 

Anyway, Python objects are lightweight enough for most purposes.

I'm not entirely sure why the idea of ZTables went away so completely. 
Python tables in the ZODB combined with the catalog should make for an
interesting system to play with. Though perhaps there are products
out there that actually do this. Come to think of it, MetaPublisher
(not to be confused with MetaKit) can use a ZODB backend, can't it?

Regards,

Martijn