[Zope] Can Zope Do....?

Paul Winkler pw_lists at slinkp.com
Wed Dec 1 19:16:20 EST 2004


On Wed, Dec 01, 2004 at 07:01:20PM -0500, Alan Snyder wrote:
> 1) Authenticate against a SAML service or other XML based
> authentication scheme. How about a kerberos service?

Authentication in zope is handled by UserFolders. 
Drop in a third-party UserFolder that does what you want, 
or write your own based on SimpleUserFolder or ExUserFolder.
Dunno about whether there are UF's for SAML or kerberos,
but google should answer that. 

> 2) If I have a table of, say, 100,000 records in PostgreSQL, can I
> configure Zope somehow to list a particular set of columns from that
> table in a list, 

sure

> and also provide edit/add pages to modify and insert
> records against the table? 

sure

> How hard/easy is it to do something like
> this? Are there any frameworks or classes to aide with this kind of
> stuff?

Out of the box there's ZSQLMethods which let you do arbitrary
SQL statements, with configurable caching for expensive results.

There's also APE which promises to let you use an SQL back end
(among other things) as a ZODB storage so you could treat the data 
as rows or as objects, whatever's convenient. 
But this probably takes some work to set up. Never used it myself yet.

Also there's something called SQLObject but I've never used it.

> 3) I know Zope has workflow, but can it be configured to work with
> external workflow services like JBPM running on a Jboss server?

i don't know what "work with" would mean in this context.
If JBPM is something that can do xmlrpc or more generally
make HTTP requests, then sure you could have it control zope.
No idea whether this would be advisable in practice.

> management, but more like database records management, with workflow
> and security, etc., via web services. I know this is a general
> question, but any input is greatly needed and appreciated.

haven't done this myself.

> 5) How friendly, overall, is zope with XML and web services like SOAP?
> If this is just a function of Python, then that's good enough.

No SOAP AFAIK.
However, Zope supports XML-RPC.
You can also of course do a lot with the REST style
(just using http post/get etc.)

> 6) Finally, how is zope different / better than plone? They're both
> CMS systems that seem to have a large following and a great API. I'm

You've misunderstood. Zope is an application server.
Plone is a content management application written for zope. There
is no plone without zope.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com


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