[Zope] RE: [Zope-dev] the birth of ZCommerce

Rob Page rob.page@digicool.com
Wed, 4 Aug 1999 07:53:20 -0400


> Josh Zeidner wrote:
<SNIP>
> > automated through the net.  *Anything* that has to do with 
> accounting should
> > be the domain of the accounting system.

I tend to agree...  Absolutely the worst place in a company to have
redundant or inconsistent data is in accounting systems... unless you're
the US Internal Revenue Service -- then you compute the average of the
six systems...  :^|

Other comments have been made on this thread alluding that storage in an
RDBMS is an answer.  We've found *NUMEROUS* times with "Open-,
RDBMS-backed solutions" that while the data are available for SELECTs
and UPDATES that the table keys are generated in a proprietary fashion.
Of course anything without a valid key is ether discarded or ignored.  I
know the vendors do this to keep incident-based support from losing
money.

However, the notion that you can report-all-day-long doesn't meet the
requirement of having a fully e-integrated business.  One package we
used actually FORCED you to make a DDE call to generate the ID!!!
BLECH, BLECH, BLECH.

One of our biggest selling points for Zope is that people don't want the
software to become their organization, they want their organization (at
least the online part) to be manifest in some software.  This is the
design notion behind the Zope Portal TOOLKIT.  We can't design The
Portal -- what we can do is identify, through experience, recurring
components and spend some infrastructure time developing and hardening
those. For these reasons and consistent with other posts (Scott
Robertson?) on this list I'd LOVE to see a ZCommerce TOOLKIT.

If everyone writes their own primitive systems or, worse, writes their
own monoliths, none of it will improve in the Zope Bazaar.  If we all
write using notions of toolkits the underlying components will get
better and better over time.  Don't know about you, but the notion of
supporting my OWN cybercash adapter isn't too interesting...

--Rob