[Zope] - Experimental 'External Objects' Product Available

[Amos Latteier]

Fellow Zopistas:

Despite the fact whatever Jim Fulton may think about the merit of the idea,
I wrote a first cut at a Zope Product that allows you to plug normal Bobo
objects into Zope. It is basically a slightly hacked version of External
Method which I am calling External Objects. You can get it at:

http://www.zope.org/Download/Contrib

It is only lightly tested, and should not be considered official. However,
it does seem to let you more or less plug existing Bobo modules into Zope.

To use it download the tarball. Ungzip and untar it in your Zope directory.
Now shutdown and restart Zope. Now you should have be able to create
External Objects.

To create an external objects object, proceed like you are creating an
external method. Copy your module to either 'Zope/Extensions' or
'Zope/lib/python/Products/SomeProduct/Extensions'. Your module should
define some toplevel Bobo objects. Now create the External Objects object.
Specify your module name and the names of the objects you want to use. The
list of objects should be space delimited. That's it. Now you can access
your Bobo objects as attributes of the External Objects product.

Notes: If your objects use Acquisition, they will be correctly patched in
to the Zope object hierarchy. If your objects use BoboPOS, you should
not/cannot store your objects in Zope's object database. I'm not sure what
the right thing to do here is... There may be a good solution to this
problem, I just haven't though the issue through at all.

This is just an experiment, and I only wrote it because I suggested it and
no one else seems to have written it yet ;-)

Have fun.

-Amos