[Zope] Re: Ape

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Mar 16, 2006 at 11:00:11AM -0500, Chris Kratz wrote:
> > Now, if using svn for source control is the only reason he was using
> > APE, surely you'd agree that DirecotyViews are a more appropriate method?
> >
> > cheers,
> >
> > Chris
> 
> Yes, you are more or less correct.   The primary reason we went to APE was 
> after having tried the nightmares of the various zope cvs products which just 
> seemed to be able to tie themselves into knots after awhile.  APElib allowed 
> us to persist all objects as plain text files on the file system so that 
> normal file system tools can be used for development.  After we went to APE 
> we moved from CVS to subversion.  Now most of us develop using a text editor 
> directly modifying our zope objects.  We have the refresh interval dialed 
> down to 1s on our dev boxes and 5-10 minutes on the live servers.  This 
> allows us to easily shoehorn minor patches (fix - commit - update server) 
> without any service interruption on the live server.  So, our reasons for 
> using Apelib were...
>  
> 1. Allow use of source control (branching, diffs, revision history, etc) on 
> all content types as plain text files, not python pickles.
> 2. Allow editing of zope objects (DTML, ZPT, ZSQL, py script) externally in 
> appropriate editor.
> 3. Allow us to quickly push out minor patches to running servers.
> 4. A distant final item was using TTW editing to do minor tweaks.

DirectoryViews would mean you'd lose #4.
Otherwise, I think they'd work for you and it's a much simpler solution
than ape.

Also, if you have any persistent objects for which there isn't an existing
FSObject-derived version, you'd have to write one.

Another issue is that AFAIK there's no way to control the refresh
interval of FSObject subclasses.  I guess you could monkeypatch
FSObject._updateFromFS.  You might want to do that anyway so you
don't have to run your production servers in debug mode.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com