[Zope] zope zen needed...

[Erik Myllymaki]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "J Cameron Cooper" <jccooper at jcameroncooper.com>
To: "Erik Myllymaki" <erik.myllymaki at aviawest.com>; "Zope user list"
<zope at zope.org>
Sent: Friday, September 05, 2003 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: [Zope] zope zen needed...


>
> >I have a fairly large intranet site built on Zope. At first it mainly
> >generated
> >reports, but it is starting to be more of a web application then a
reporting
> >tool and I am thinking I need to make some decisions now about design.
> >
> >Eventually, I would like my users to be able to access the underlying
> >services with a client other than a web browser. Do I carry on as I am
and
> >then build a client that accesses the zope objects via XMLRPC, or do I
start
> >making an external python API that I can then access through Zope or my
> >other client(PyQT gui, PyGTK gui, etc.), or...
> >
> Depends on your "other clients." Build your server such that they will
> have easiest access. If you were in the Java world, that would mean
> exposing things via RMI. In these parts, the best thing for RPC is
> probably XML-RPC, and since Zope can provide that for free (whereas a
> separate Python library that would communicate with Zope and the rest of
> the world would have to have this added), that may be the way to go. But
> it's not the only way: you may want to consider REST for access to your
> "web services". It's a natural fit with Zope, existing sites (in
> general), and almost any thing you might write a client in can surely
deal.
>
> http://internet.conveyor.com/RESTwiki/moin.cgi/
>
> And, as a bonus, if you're RESTful in Zope, that stuff is still
> available via XML-RPC, WebDAV or whatever might be added to Zope (SOAP?)
> in the future.
>
> Which is not to say that having a Python API is a bad thing either. My
> (still largely theoretical, granted) approach to the subject: build most
> of the logic in Python external to Zope (as far as possible), wrap it up
> in filesystem products, and expose a RESTful layer in Zope. Have your
> web-app (a display layer) decorate the data from that layer. Not only
> does this give you tremendous flexibility in data access, it gives you
> some nice clean lines of separation, and that's usually worth its
> (imaginary) weight in gold, even if it does take a bit longer to
> implement than putting everything in the same big heap.

Thanks for this - this is a great bit of advice.

Can you explain *wrap it up in filesystem products* ...?

Maybe in doing so you will help me answer the following...

...I made some external methods to access a database, make an object out of
the results (result.column_names(), result.rows(), result.sql(), etc.)
but can't seem to access this result object in the way I would have expected
within the DTML of my pages. I little looking around in the archives
suggested that external methods are not up to this task for security reasons
and I have to make a *full-fledged Zope Product* if I want to access
self-made objects in this manner - any further enlightnement on this...?

Thanks again.