[Zope3-Users] Re: (distributed) Communication between components

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Dear Reinhold,

zope3-dev is about the development *of* Zope 3 itself, not the
development *with* Zope 3. This is a question for zope3-users, I'm
therefore CCing zope3-users instead of zope3-dev.

> So, I would like to know the forms of communication between distributed
> components or distributed components and clients. As far as I know, Zope
> focusses on HTML communication, also allowing XML-RPC calls to
> components.

Zope 3 supports several network protocols, the most prominent being
HTTP. Out of the box it supports different flavours of HTTP, such as

* regular HTTP/WebDAV
* Browser pages (mostly HTML, but could be other stuff, too)
* XML-RPC
* SOAP

You can add support for other HTTP-based protocols easily these days
using the <publisher /> ZCML directive.

XML-RPC is covered in my book (http://worldcookery.com), including a
simple Python and Java demo client that accesses data and calls methods
in Zope remotely.

> But is this still the only possiblity? If yes, how could
> security be integrated in such communication?

That all depends on your requirements. One of Zope's strongholds is a
flexible and powerful security and authentication system.

> And if yes, I mean is that
> a disadvantage in comparision to J2EE where RMI enables communication to
> server still like local calls. If no, what other kinds of communication
> are possible?

I'm not sure what you mean by "distributed components", but ZEO is
definitely a very transparent way of having distributed clients have
access to objects of a single remote source.

Philipp