[ZODB-Dev] is zodb good for this project?

[Thomas Guettler]

horst@freedict.de wrote:

>Hello,
>
>I am writing a (bilingual)dictionary application, and therefore
>need some database. I tried to use metakit (for python), but had
>various problems, most likely due to my lack of understanding the
>concepts behind it.
>
>
>I keep the dictionary entries in unicode / XML format. The access
>to the entries should be direct access (word search) as well as
>linear (sorted) acess to the words (wordlists, as in dictionares)
>- words should be sorted language specific (umlauts / accents,
>...)
>
>The (string) data per dictionary can easily be 20MBytes, but as I
>understand, ZODB might be able to directly store the XML tree?
>
I would take a different approach: Programm a python product in zope 
which contains
words as properties. Then use ZCatalog for searching.

See http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/SearchingZCatalog.dtml for 
what ZCatalog can do.
If you want to share the dictionaries data with a different programm you 
can serialize your dictionary
to XML.

20MB are no problem. You can update the index when the entries get 
changed. This means you need
no long update runs.

If you don't want a HTML frontend, but prefere a GUI you could use 
XML-RPC to access zope.
Maybe it is possible to it like this with standalone ZODB, too.


HTH, Thomas