[Zope] ftp editing methods

[Brian Lloyd]

> This probably isn't a new idea but:
> 
> How about having the ability to define in the Zope UI certain 
> protocols
> (or Roles+Protocols) as "editing" protocols instead of "publishing"
> protocols, like WebDAV and FTP for example. When objects are accessed
> via those protocols, instead of seeing a single object, you 
> see all it's
> properties, meta type, etc as sub-objects which you can edit
> individually.

This is still a harder problem than it appears on the surface. For
example, it is not possible to tell for sure during a GET whether
the client is a DAV client or not - this is a lamosity that I hope
to get the time to address with the IETF WebDAV group at some point.

FTP is a little more clear-cut, but there are still problems with
trying to graft capabilities like property management onto a 
protocol that was never designed to support it. Perhaps you could
see properties as a "subobject" of a DTMLDocument for example, and
if you accessed the properties via FTP maybe you would get some sort
of xml representation of them which you could edit and save to update
the properties. But what does that mean for FTP clients? Everything
will look like a directory, and things begin to behave less like you
would expect if you don't know much about what's going on. 

One of the goals of FTP/DAV integration is to allow a greater range 
of users to interact with Zope in a way that fits their tool prefs 
and level of knowledge -- for example, WYSIWYG tools like Dreamweaver,
etc. could use FTP behind the scenes and act as a non-threatening
front end to Zope for less experienced users. I suspect that such
tools would not behave quite in the expected way if all documents
suddenly looked like containers :(  

Making FTP more useful is certainly a Good Thing, but exactly how we 
do that will require some careful consideration - especially in terms
of hijacking the protocol to do Zope-specific things, since invalidating
the expectations of clients would foil much of what we'd hoped to 
achieve with FTP integration. Just my $0.02...


Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com