[Zope] Zope Futures discussion: your input

[Michael Bernstein]

One of the issues I think are important for web application development
are link or pointers to arbitrary objects (ie. not contained within the
object) of a certain type, so that it is easier to create many-to-many
relationships.

An example:

Authors write many books, books can have more than one author.

It does not make sense to create 'book' objects within the 'author'
objects, nor does it make sense to do the reverse.

instead, author objects and book objects should each be contained in
their own heirarchies, and an external repository (probably based on
ZCatalog) would contain bi-directional link objects.

If an object subclasses a 'linking' class, it would get a tab that shows
all the objects that it links to, and new objects added through that tab
are added to the link repository automatically.

Further, it would be nice if it were possible to traverse into the
linked-to object to access its properties, ie:
<dtml-var Author.Name> from within the 'book' object.

Michael Bernstein.