[Zope-dev] ZClasses Maintenance and Upgrade

[Christopher Lozinski]

Well I have finally reached the stage where I am pushing the limits of 
ZClasses and would love an upgrade.  Guess I need to do it myself.

I run 38 specialty job boards, and am getting close to automatically 
putting up 300 more, each one has a custom ZClass.

I am automatically generating ZClasses, Indexes, and Formulator Form's 
Fields.   I don't like that each parent class lists its legal children, 
I think it would be better if the child listed the legal parents.  The 
creation of an add permission for each of the 300 ZClasses I am about to 
generate also bothers me. 

I do not quite understand the design of ZClasses.  I would expect that a 
class has three branches.  One would be the class methods, one would be 
the instance methods, and one would be the list of instance variables. 

It would be nice if each instance variable had its own permission.

Instead ZClasses has the create method  and permissions at the same 
level as the ZClass.  I think this is related to how zope handles 
Products.  And then the instance variables are all on a propertysheet.  
I suspect this is because of how permissions are handled, there is 
computational efficiency in sharing a permission among the properties on 
a propertysheet.

But I am not quite sure.   Anyone want to enlighten me on this matter.   
I may take the liberty of calling up Jim Fulton for him to explain the 
history to me.

On a related matter I think it would be great if we do a version of 
ZClasses that used the new Zope 3 permissions in 5, and that worked with 
the new ZODB concurrency control mechanisms. 

Regards
Chris