Quick Summaries of Recent Experiences Writing a Small Application for Zope 3

For the last couple of weeks (last few days of the old year, first few days of the new), I've been working on a small application written in Zope 3. This time it's a Knowledge Base application. A simple setup, in general - add articles to a container, organized by tags (keywords). Some of it has been easy, some of it has been a bit trying. It's taken a while because I've been using this as an opportunity to explore some of the new features of Zope 3.2, which was released in final form recently, as well as some available components that I haven't been able to take advantage of until now.

Good: ZODB. The ZODB is still the best option for persistence. With Zope 3, separating out the persistent core model objects is a cleaner and more obvious design solution than it was in Zope 2. Unlike an object-relational mapping, the ZODB is pure python persistence and there's no translation needed from database values and Python values. Where does this really stand out? It's most obvious in container / contained relationships, which is the most common type of one-to-one mapping. Hierarchies are easily represented, and most containers are used just like any Python mapping (dictionary-style) object. But where else does the ZODB show its strength? When using Python values like tuples. 'keywords' can just be a tuple of strings. There's no need to create a lookup table to map an item in one row to one or more keywords. foo.tags = ('silly', 'example') saves as Python, loads as Python.

Mixed: SetIndexes. The only way to get these great plug-in indexes for Zope 3's "catalog" system, which provides indexing support to Zope 3 applications for rapid querying of content data, is to check them out from Subversion. The indexes that come with Zope 3 are barely-there, it seems. But they do their job competently. The zc.catalog code provides new indexes that are easier to query and provides some new features. The best one - SetIndex. With 'tags' set up as a SetIndex in the catalog, searching for AnyOf tags for an iterable value, like ('silly', 'example'), quickly returns all items whose tags (which can be adapted to) have either of those words in their set. The SetIndex works great. I hope these indexes can find their way into the core or into a more available release.

Mostly Good: Viewlets. Generally, I like viewlets for designing applications like this. Existing documentation is very developer heavy. But at least that documentation exists and I can (generally) understand it. Viewlets make it possible, at the very least, to componentize web pages. Knowing the best practices for how to use them or their managers is a little vague right now. In general, my experience with Viewlets was really good. They were handy for handling menus, little boxes on the side (like 'search' or 'related tags'). They can be applied to only certain content items, or even certain views, or even more constrained within that. They make it easier to pull a lot of "display logic" out of master templates and into Python classes with specific responsibilities. They make it easier to pull a web page (or different pages) apart into a specification that says "this is the header viewlet manager, this is the sidebar. Register for the ISidebarManager to put a viewlet in there". Then a new viewlet for the sidebar, such as a search box, can be written and registered for the ISidebarManager months later and should slide in easily, using the component architecture instead of brute-force templating or vague conventions.

Good: Annotations. "Annotations" are how other components and systems can add specialized data to a content object without interfering with that object's data. One of the nice things about relational databases is the way that tables can easily be made to "relate" to other tables. In a RDBMS content management system, a lot of the Dublin Core metadata spec would probably be kept in a dublincore table with columns for the different elements, and all content items might have a "dublincore_id" column to facilitate joining. In Zope 3, Annotations provide similar one-to-one mappings. This isn't contained data, per se. It's extra info for an object. Annotations are kept in their own namespaces, and everything that uses annotations maintains its own namespace. All that a content object has to do is declare support for an annotatable interface, the most common being "IAttributeAnnotatable" which stores the root annotations for that content object on a special attribute (__annotatable__ or something like that). The nice thing is that all of these internals are kept hidden. The component architecture is used to access the annotations. A ZODB based object can easily support this extra attribute, but an object from an object-relational mapper or some other data source might not. A different annotator could be provided for those. Client code shouldn't have to worry about how the annotations are stored (or even if annotations are how the code is being stored).

Good: Formlib. zope.formlib is a new feature of Zope 3.2. It's a more powerful and generalized form system than the one that's in zope.app.form. Note that neither of these form libraries are responsible for field specifications nor widgets. It does provide a lot of useful functions, classes, and decorators for getting and validating input from widgets against a set of field specifications, for rendering widgets, for handling errors (including invariants), and handling actions (different "submit" buttons, how to handle input errors if 'Preview' is clicked instead of 'Save'). Nicely, it puts a lot of this power into Python classes and not configuration. It allows for, I suppose, beautiful programming. My limited experiences with formlib have been more rewarding than my experiences with zope.app.form.

Frustrating, but good I guess: Custom Traversal. Zope, going back to Bobo, has always been a strong proponent of "nice URLs". In Zope, you traverse to objects to publish them. This has always been the core concept of the system. And you could always provide some custom traversal, but the APIs for doing it in the past were vague and increasingly forgotten. There were a couple of options available to me for doing these tag URLs, where the tags in the URL were just to be used to construct a catalog query. One option involved just getting all of the names past a certain point and chopping them off of the traversal stack, ending traversal at the root of the 'tags' search. This was easiest, but not really fitting with the object publishing style of Zope, since the 'tags/foo/bar' wasn't publishing an object at 'bar', but at 'tags'. I replaced this first implementation with one that actually published objects for each tag in the URL. This wasn't necessarily easy, at least not when compared to things like Django's URL Dispatch. But now that it's in place, I like it better. Perhaps I'm just too used to Bobo's concept of object publishing. The biggest frustration was that there are a few traversing APIs and adapters to choose from, but each does different things, and finding the one to use for URLs specifically was not obvious. Even more frustrating - I think I just realized a more Pythonic way to write my tag traverser (basically to allow 'getitem' use, so that ...tags/foo/bar/baz really turns into Python (or could be done in Python with) ..tags['foo']['bar']['baz'].

Bad: This Post. It's past midnight on Sunday. I'm posting this primarily because I've been promising to write something about my recent experiences. They've been mostly good. I'm having a lot of fun with Zope 3. There are some frustrations from time to time, and it sure could use a good site housing tips and tricks and recipes and articles like "New in Zope 3.2 - formlib. What it means to you as a form developer". I haven't given very much back to the community, but if time permits (which it seldom does), I'd like to provide more things like that in a better atmosphere than the one provided by this blog. I make no promises. Time is a rare commodity between personal, professional, and artistic obligations. And NFL playoffs and ski days.