[Zope3-dev] [DRAFT] local portlets and perspectives

[Gary Poster]

On Aug 24, 2005, at 2:24 PM, Jean-Marc Orliaguet wrote:

>
> Hi!
>
> Somehow related to the discussion on optimizing catalog queries, I  
> have
> been thinking about how to best implement local portlets in  
> cpsskins in
> terms of scalability, performance and functionality. The  
> implementation
> is heavily dependent on being able to performance effective catalog
> queries (it is OK to wait 2 seconds in an ECMS to search 1 million
> documents, but it is not OK to have to wait 2 seconds to render a page
> containing portlets).
>
> Here is the proposal:
> http://www.z3lab.org/sections/blogs/jean-marc-orliaguet/ 
> 2005_08_24_local-portlets
>
> It is built on the notion of "Perspective" (see the link) and on the
> idea of querying the catalog using triadic relations instead of  
> joining
> sets of query results based on dyadic predicates (such as with RDF).

I need to read more to have a more complete reply (though I'm hoping  
Benji will do it for me, since he knows more about CPSSkins than I),  
but here are a few responses, based on reading it and talking it over  
with Benji.

Your overall model is interesting to me because it goes a good way to  
unifying the various portlet use cases.  I know of six categories:  
page designer wants to fill slots for a site; page designer wants to  
fill slots for a section of a site; page designer wants to fill slots  
for a page on a site; user wants to fill slots for a site; user wants  
to fill slots for a section of a site; and user wants to fill slots  
for a page on a site.  The section and page use cases might be  
collapsed technically, but have a different feel to a user, IMO, and  
so should be separated.  Combining these into a unified model is  
impressive and cool.

I worry that the description does not get into the possible UI  
expectation differences between a page designer and a user, and  
between working on a site or section versus a single page.  These  
seem like tricky UI bits to get right to me.  I'd be interested in  
seeing a discussion of your thoughts of the UI from this perspective,  
especially in regards to showing a user, within an editing screen,  
which portlets are being edited from a page perspective, from a per- 
user perspective, from a section perspective, and so on.  It seems  
like it could cause information overload.

The 'perspective' idea is a good concept for the discussion (and I  
used the word above), but you claim that it is a single element in a  
triadic relationship, then list several perspectives, each of which  
could influence the lookup.  This means to me that it is not triadic  
but 'n-ary'.  Moreover, it seems a lot more like a graph walk, for  
which we don't need new code in CPSSkins, than a new n-ary data  
index.  RDFLib or any similar graph implementation with typed  
relationships would get the efficiency you want, as far as I can  
tell, with a lot less new code to maintain.

Gary