[Zope] Best way to serve structured data - pointers needed

Pertti Kellomäki pk@cs.tut.fi
Tue, 15 Jan 2002 10:14:03 +0200


I am contemplating to start a project to build a site for 
storing and serving structured data (animal training plans
in my case). I'm a bit overwhelmed by what's available, so
I would appreciate any advice and pointers to Zope products
and documentation.

The format of the data is fairly simple, basically a datum
is just a list of items. Since I want my users to be able to download
data in a way that preserves structure, I am leaning towards using
XML. I don't really need all the fancy features provided by
the various Zope XML products, so I'll probably write my own parser
in a couple of lines of Python.

The partial requirements are as follows:
	- It should be possible to view training plans in nicely
	  formatted HTML.
	- It should also be possible to upload and download training 
	  plans as raw XML.
	- It should be possible to browse plans by categories and
	  by full text search.
	- Training plans should have relationships (e.g. plan X is
	  derived from plan Y) that users can query (e.g. show me all
	  the training plans derived from Z).

I have a rough idea of how to do this in Zope, but I would hate to
put a lot of effort into it just to discover that there happens to
be a product that would make the whole thing trivial.

Thanks,

	Pertti