[aclug-L] Re: volunteers

[Jonathan Hall <jonhall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

To answer your first question, yes, one-to-many correlations are possible. 
Any data type is possible.  And Zope has many nice hooks for integrating
such things into the UI--and the "many" don't necissarily need to be
predefined.  For instance, we could have a "What Linux distro(s) do you
use?" question/field.  Then as Zope creates the list of available options,
it can search the existing users, sort by any criteria (alphabetically?) and
eliminate duplicates on the fly (without any extra programming, really), and
immediately the user will see a drop-down list, multiple check boxes, or
whatever other format you select, showing their options, with a possible
"Other" field to specify their own.

The same result can be created fairly easily with a simple add_distro()
function (or something to that effect--you get the idea), but with Zope
there's no need to "add" anything, as it creates the list each time upon
execution, making for an extremely flexible database structure.

Perhaps OpenACS and/or other such applications can do similar things... I
don't know.  I'm just reporting on what I know Zope can do.


When I say "Zope Novice" I consider my Zope learning experience, where I
deployed an automobile catalog with dummy-editable (from the web) interface
for a friend of mine who needed a web site for their auto dealership's web
site.  I went from zero Zope experience to a fully functional web site in
aproximately 40 hours of work, and that 40 hours included reading the
relevant portions of the online Zope Book (I think I read about 2/3 of it
for my project).

Now I do have other programming experience (C, C++, Perl, etc) so there
wasn't the same learning curve for me that there would be for most
programming newbies.

I still consider myself for the most part a Zope Novice, though.  40 hours
in any language/environment isn't a lot of experience (even if it did result
in a working web application).

I'll also mention that I know almost no Python at all... So knowing Python
is not necissarily a prerequisite for learning Zope.  Although... from what
I hear (and what I'm learning as I do try to learn python better), Zope can
be much more efficiently used when combined with a knowledge of Python.

If anyone is interested in looking at the Automobile Catalog I built, I can
put it on the web somewhere with public access to the web editing interface
(which is where the power of my web application really shows).  The page
itself is butt ugly... I'm not a web designer!  But the logic is kinda cool,
I think. :-)

-- Jonathan



On Fri, Feb 08, 2002 at 04:49:48PM -0600, Tom Hull wrote:
> 
> Jonathan Hall wrote:
> > 
> > > How would you implement something like Ryan Hunt's request (browsable,
> > > searchable database of member information, member-controlled) in zope?
> > 
> > That functionality fundamentally exists in Zope "out of the box"... the only
> > work that needs to be done is writing a public front-end to the "add user"
> > function.  I'm sure there are many 3rd party products to do this already.
> > If not, it could probably be done by a Zope novice in an afternoon, and by a
> > Zope expert in less than an hour.
> 
> You can extend the member database schema to include new fields, including
> one-to-many items like Linux distros? Then extend the UI to administer and
> search on those new fields? Just checking.
> 
> Actually, I don't doubt that it could be done, nor that it would be fairly
> easy. But I don't buy your SWAGs for a minute, especially for novices (who
> I've found can take weeks or months and fail completely). I think I could
> do this from scratch in php/mysql in 1-2 days, although I'd probably SWAG
> it at 2-3; openacs would be significantly easier, since the member tables
> and administration framework already exist -- I just "alter table" to fix
> up the database, then patch up the UI. If you have zope set up to use an
> external relational database (i.e., not the default object database), the
> job should be pretty much the same.
> 
> > -- Jonathan
> 
> -- 
> /*
>  *  Tom Hull * thull at kscable.com * http://www.tomhull.com/
>  */
> -- This is the discussion@xxxxxxxxx list.  To unsubscribe,
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