[Zope3-dev] Object Serialization Brainstorm

[Chris Withers]

Lennart Regebro wrote:
> 
> From: "Casey Duncan" <c.duncan@nlada.org>
> > The key question is: Is it possible to design the system such that any
> > object visible in the ZMI could be arbitrarily (and automatically)
> > transformed or serialized into externally usable XML?
> 
> Automatically? I can't see how. Even the example you give is not
> possible to do automatically, but require the object to know how to
> transform themselves itself into XML. How would you otherwise know that the
> data attribute is to be tranformed into a file with an encoding?

I completely agree with this, however, I really think Zope 3 should have better
storage abstraction. I love the ZODb, but dumping pickles into XML or RDBMS
hardly seems like an optimal solution.

How likely/possible is a decent configurable orbject/relation and/or object/xml
mapping for Zope 3 or ZODB 4?

cheers,

Chris