[Zope] Help! How would I use Oracle for persistence?

[Bradford Hull]

I'm trying to evaluate Zope for use in our scattering of projects, and it's 
been maddeningly delightful.  I see a design with wonderful cleanness and 
simplicity, yet complete coverage for all we need to do.  The one problem I 
have is that old standard Unix problem: all the documentation assumes you 
already have the specifics you need from some other unspecified, and in 
this case nonexistent, document.

After days of digging through every available document and the archives of 
this list, I realized that it should be possible to store stuff in a 
database if I can figure out a handful of things I can't seem to glean from 
the documentation:

1) Where do I put the python files to use in an External Method?  Here, the 
documentation offers a couple of highly ambiguous hints (Put them in the 
Extensions directory of your Zope directory, which directory you may have 
to create.  OK, that narrows it down to maybe a dozen that this term could 
refer to.  Or an Extensions directory under your product (lib/python/
Products/<myProduct>/Extensions) - now that's the least ambiguous one, but 
I can't help suspecting there's a key fact or 60 being left out here...
Since most of the rest of the documentation assumes you already know almost
everything you need, and refrains from 'repeating' it.

2) Can an External Method, or more to the point, an Extension, get at other 
Zope objects?  If so, I can use the Oracle connection I put in my folder 
and which is obligingly open.  If so, how?  This doesn't come up in any of 
the examples.

Answers to these two may let me do some trivial prototyping so I can find 
out if this thing is as wonderful as it looks.  I assume it must be, 
because everybody keeps making sense in their praise of this obviously 
wonderful design.  I'll be willing to accept the idea that I'm a fool not 
to use Bobo, too, but I still need these answers to stand a chance either 
way.

I'll be delighted to help make documentation improvements, because if it is 
this great, it deserves to be useable by everybody.  Frankly, the 
documentation as it stands is great marketing material, but maddening if you 
want to insert and update data in a database, or indeed add/update data at 
all.
-- 
Bradford K. Hull  | **> Never let a computer see you hurry. <**
brad@tera.com     |                                  Bradford K. Hull
(206)701-2066     |