[Zope] - OO paradigm

Michael Bernstein mbernstein@profitscape.net
Thu, 21 Jan 1999 14:05:12 -0800


Paulo Eduardo Neves wrote:

> Michael Bernstein wrote:
> >
> > An example would be an event calendar, where events can be organized
> > chronologicaly ( Years>Months>Days) but also according to an event
> > category heirarchy (All events>entertainment>music>concerts). These
> > heirarchies only intersect at the leaf node of an individual event.
> >
> > Most product catalogs can be profitably organized using multiple
> > heirarchies as well.
> >
> > So how would you do this in Zope? you could of course represent the
> > alternative heirarchies by branching off the bottom of the primary, or
> > as folder properties, but that doesn't seem as elegant or maintainable.
> > perhaps the answer is some sort of 'pseudo heirarchy' object that could
> > be placed at or near the top of the object tree.
> >
> > What do you all think?
>
> It would be nice if Zope object hierarchy wouldn't be a hierarchy :-)
> Instead of a object tree we would have a object lattice. This is viable
> since we always have the info about which path to follow in the lattice,
> it is the object URL.

Yes, this was what I meant. Each individual 'pseudo hierarchy' object is
still a strict hierarchy, but because they intersect, the actual content
structure of the site as a whole is a multidimensional lattice.

This has several uses, such as the ability to show alternative content
depending on a second top level hierarchy (as with your language example), or
if you are using the additional hierarchy to represent a different
organization of the same content, your server logs will very explicitly show
what navigation methods are preferred by your users. One other idea I had was
to have path dependent navigation rendering, instead of just context
dependent navigation.

Any comments?

Michael Bernstein.