[Zope-dev] ZServer design ideas: gneeral comments

[Ross J. Reedstrom]

Ross J. Reedstrom wrote:

Another theme from metadata '99 was convergence: all the different
communities are starting to do the same thing, but coming from different
directions.  This leads to part of the "The nice thing about standards
is that there are so many of them to choose from" problem. In the
context of my previous mail, the converging communities are the database
people (particularly CORBA object database people) and the WWW
community. And their competing standards are:

XMI (XML Metadata Interchange) from OMG and
RDF (Resource Description Format) from W3C

Looks to me like they cover pretty much the same turf, with different
emphases. Hopefully, if ZServer is a pluggable and flexible as I think
it is, supporting both (eventually) should be an option.  The choice of
what to implement first may depend on what tools someone needs to make
Zope compatible with: db/CASE stuff, for XMI, or the equivalent web site
authoring tools, for RDF. Of course, the willingness to spend the time
or money to do it or have DC do it will be the final deciding factor. I
think I'd bet that an Python RDF parser pops up first.

That first category might be more directly applicable to Zope than the
average webslinger might imagine, especially since Paul intoned on
Friday:

>Zope2 will go a long way towards making object storage more
>confidence-inspiring through (a) change in format and (b) allowing
>storage in "safe" managers such as an RDBMS or bsddb.

Perhaps CORBA? Zope as a CORBA client, turning objects into HTML? I may
be talking through my hat here - what I don't know about CORBA could
fill libraries.

Hmm, there also seems to be a dearth of Free CASE tools. Perhaps the
XML/RDF stuff will fix that, via the back door :-)

Ross

P.S.
I just discovered a benefit of having a conversation with yourself via
an email list: I can reply to the list without editing myself out - my
MUA does it for me!

-- 
Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> 
NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer
Computer and Information Technology Institute
Rice University, 6100 S. Main St.,  Houston, TX 77005