Thanks to those who posted suggestions - certainly gave me a few things to think about. Unfortunately I was left with one "use Zope 2", one "use Zope 3" and a "use Plone", but maybe that's just a reflection of the fact that there's more than one Zope way to skin a cat! (yeah, I know I've over-simplified the answers - no offence is meant!)
On another thread (http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2005-June/159738.html), someone said: "The problem is that you develop using the ZMI. It's a bad pattern. Don't do it." but the Zope Book (2.7 version)'s chapter on Creating a Basic Application all seems to be through the ZMI. Now, Zope's original appeal to me was using the graphical interface provided by the ZMI to create a collection of objects which if you wire them up correctly will become an application, a view that I think is supported by the Zope Book. However, this view, and what I've read about Zope 3 seems to indicate that this way of doing things is deprecated. Am I correct here? Particularly, if I am building an app that I think I will want to add extra functionality to after it has been installed and is in use, is this a particular reason to avoid developing with ZMI? Say, for example that my Zope App in some way has a "House" object, which records the address, the owner, and a short description. Later on, I may wish to add further fields to record, say, the number of bedrooms, but the system is already in use - if I've developed in the ZMI, will this make it harder to make an upgrade? Now, if the answer to all of that is "yes", then I think that steers me away from the need for TTW development (TTW = Through The Web = ZMI, yes?) which steers me towards Zope 3. I'm interested by the suggestions on how to handle the relations. > Hmm, what I would start with is an attribute for a > house containing a > list of references to owners. And vice versa, each > owner has a list of > references to houses. I had thought of this, but my concern was about how to make sure that the two records are kept accurate - basically the suggestion is to keep two records saying the same thing, which just triggers alarm bells with me. Another suggestion was: > Nah. You either let every PropertyOwner have a list > of the ids of > HouseProperty objects, or the other way around. Then > you index this is > the catalog so you can search. Tada! I like the sound of this a bit better - just keep records in one place. So, if I've followed, I let the the house "knows" who owns it, and if I go to a certain owner's page and want it to give me a list of all the houses she owns, it would do a search through all the house records to see where she's mentioned. Thanks again for all the help so far - lots of food for thought. Thanks, Jim --- Andreas Pakulat <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 16.Jun 2005 - 23:17:43, Jim Vine wrote: > > Specifically, I've been scratching my head for a > while > > about how to handle a many-many relationship: a > > property owner may own more than one house; > > conversely, a house may have more than one > co-owner - > > consequently it's not appropriate to have either > > containing the other. I've googled for general > > information about handling many-many relationships > in > > OO, and most of what I've come across has only > > indicated that it can be tricky! > > Hmm, what I would start with is an attribute for a > house containing a > list of references to owners. And vice versa, each > owner has a list of > references to houses. Now in Zope references could > be implemented via > storing the URL of the house and references to Users > could be stored via > the username (the one the user uses to log in). > > > While Im on, Ive noticed that Zope 3 has been > > released. Is this now the recommended development > > environment, or am I better off sticking with Zope > 2 > > for now, and porting my application once Zope 3 is > a > > bit further down the line? > > Read the archive, short answer is: > > If you depend only on Zope, you don't want TTW and > you want to write a > file based product: Zope3 would be possible > > If you need some existing products or if you need > TTW-Code, then you > have to stick to Zope2 > > Andreas > > -- > You're ugly and your mother dresses you funny. > _______________________________________________ > Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org > http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope > ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** > (Related lists - > http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce > http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ) > ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Zope maillist - Zope@zope.org http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev )