[Zope3-dev] Re: skin support for xmlrpc

Stephan Richter srichter at cosmos.phy.tufts.edu
Fri Aug 24 09:12:15 EDT 2007


On Friday 24 August 2007 02:37, Christian Zagrodnick wrote:
> The term "skin" is probably missleading but was taken to keep it
> simple. It's more an "api-set".

Then don't use it! Misusing a concept can lead to a lot of confusion.

> Usecase: Different API on the same server
>
> We have a lot XML-RPC methods defined for ISite which get all their
> data in. This is quite unlike one would register XML-RPC mehtods
> normally, but the clients using the interface are not sophisticated
> enough.
>
> Now there are different "systems" talking with Zope. The systems have
> some things in common, some not. One systems calls a method, say
> list_foo anonymous, while another needs to authenticate for list_foo.
>
> The idea is now to register list_foo for different
> layers/skins/api-sets. This could also be achieved by creating dummy
> model-objects and/or traversers, but would be much less understandable.
>
> What essentially happens is that the views are registered for different
> request types.

You can solve this issue easily using pluggable traversers. There is 
absolutely no need to use skins here. For example, a traverser plugin can 
simply mark the request with a directly provided interface and return the 
same object. This would work very much like a skin without mis-using the 
concept.

> Usecase: Authenticate Users depending on the skin
>
> As i said before there are different systems which need to
> authenticate. The systems have disjunctive sets of users with
> potentially the same login names. There needs to be a way to
> authenticate without guessing which set of users we're talking about.
>
> This could also be achieved by a custom traverser or namespace.

Then use a custom traverser, please!? :-)

> It probably would not be much of a problem to remove the skin things
> again and put it directly to the project or another third-party
> component. But it doesn't feel right.

Please revert the skin support again. This is a pretty major change and I gave 
a -1 on the original discussion already. There was never a full proposal 
either.

Regards,
Stephan
-- 
Stephan Richter
CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training


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