[Zope] zope zen needed...

[J Cameron Cooper]

>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.

             --jcc
-- 
"My point and period will be throughly wrought,
Or well or ill, as this day's battle's fought."