[Zope-Moz] Re: [Zope] RDF Use cases

[Martijn Faassen]

Paul Everitt wrote:
[snip]
> I think this is the right way to think about it.  Let's take a look at a
> real-world scenario for a particular problem in Zope.
> 
> Let's face it, Zope doesn't help a whole lot when it comes to
> programming SQL.  Competing products have, for almost ten years, had
> wizards that let you point-and-click to inspect data and make forms.
> There have been Zope projects to help here, but there hasn't been much
> architectural support.

ZFormulator is my project to try to do something about this (the form
part). I could use some 'architectural support' with it though; have a
real Zope guru take a look at some of the issues. I want some critical
looks at my hacking to make my special ZFormulator form work. I also
would like some fix to a security bug there; ZFormulator is for some
reason only usable as superuser, not as manager, at the moment.

On the longer term I plan on more integration with DTML and SQL, and on
somekind of support of Zope's manage_*Property interfaces. I'd like to
make ZFormulator forms behave similarly to properties. Eventually my
megamaniacal plans involve taking over Zope's property management system
completely. ;) But this first step could help. I know this is mostly off
topic, but do take a look at ZFormulator and this kind of architectural
support may improve. Enough begging for today!
 
> Imagine if...there was a facility to get an RDF representation of a SQL
> Method, both its definition and what happened when you __call_'d it.
> You'd have access to the object metadata, like what arguments it
> expected.  You'd have access to the database connection it used, so you
> could perhaps browse the tables looking for column metadata.  And you
> could do the "Test" tab and get data back that you formatted into a much
> smarter widget in Zope _and_ in Mozilla.

This would be cool, of course, and beyond my ZFormulator project. I'm
not quite sure if ZFormulator could profit from this, if RDF only works
with browsers... I should read up on RDF to actually understand this..

Regards,

Martijn (not the Other One :)