[Zope] Best way to run Zope for hosting apps by multiple developers?

[Nicholas Dobbing]

Hi,

The University of Guelph is looking at making Zope hosting available
to our departments and organisations. Because we want to be able to
use MS Access databases, we propose to run Zope on NT (so that we can
use Z ODBC). In essence, we're looking at using Zope within an ISP
hosting model, where we will provide the infrastructure and our
clients will do their own development.

I'm trying understand how to design a Zope system to achieve two
things: 1, make it less likely that a poorly written app will
compromise the service for other developers, and 2, establish a test
environment where applications can be debugged, and then moved to a
production server.

I have two questions:

1.
I've read the FAQ for ISP's, and I've seen references in the
documentation to ways of configuring a system so that Zope so that
each client gets their own instance of Zope. This would presumably
help to insulate one Zope app from another. However, I can't find any
details about how that's done... can anyone point me to more info?

2.
Given developers with administrative control of their own folders on
two Zope servers (test and production), how can I make it possible for
them to take a test application (consisting of a set of Zope objects,
let's say within one Zope folder object), and move it to a production
Zope server. I can do this by exporting from one Zope server and
importing into another, but this involves giving the developers access
to the file system (they must place their exported object in the
"import" directory on the target Zope server), and all developers will
be dropping their objects in the same place. It's not elegant, and I
can foresee various management problems and security risks arising
from it. Are there other ways to migrate a Zope application from one
Zope server to another?

Thanks in advance for any pointers,

Nick Dobbing.

ndobbing@uoguelph.ca | (519) 824-4120 x6044
Computing & Communications Services
www.uoguelph.ca/ccs/
University of Guelph