[Zope] Client-side Zope

mindlace mindlace@imeme.net
Sun, 12 Mar 2000 07:19:24 +0000


Flemming Funch wrote:
> 
> Say I'm making a repository of documents, like articles or e-mail messages,
> and I expect to end up with 100s of thousands of those, should I
> confidently work on making them all Zope objects, or should I stick with
> mySQL records and/or files in the file system, like I normally would?

I'll take a stab at this:

Quantity of data doesn't tip the scales towards Zope or SQL.

If you have small units of data that change frequently, SQL, using a
non-transactional storage like BerkleyStorage, or packing frequently are
all reasonable approaches.

If you have a number of large (multimegabyte) files, the filesystem is
probably the best place for them, with something like LocalFS.  Also
nice because you can have a "real" ftp server serving the files, but
still use zope to reference them.

If your data expresses several many->many relations, a relational
database may be the solution, but don't underestimate the power of
Zcatalog. for data expressing one->many relationships, ZODB rocks.

In your example, I would use the ZODB because emails are always
hierarchical, and use Zcatalog to let people slice & dice it. The
articles would depend on what views you need to put on them and what
metadata you want.

You can also do some super neat stuff with ZODB+SQL, as the very
illuminating 
Zope Question : Virtual folders / URL's thread is illustrating.

-- 
mindlace@imeme.net
good design is as close as I want to get to ideology.