[TransWarp] [Fwd: Re: [ZODB-Dev] A different sort of ZODB backend]

[Phillip J. Eby]

At 11:33 AM 11/22/02 +0200, Jean Jordaan wrote:
>Would this kind of thing have a place in PEAK, or only insofar
>as Zope might be a PEAK service, and Zope can use AdaptableStorage?

[shrug]

I'm not that interested in serialization, as such.  The only serialization 
formats I'm really interested in are XMI and Python pickles.  But, the 
reflective capabilities needed to make XMI possible in PEAK will certainly 
be usable for other serialization formats.  I just don't have any real use 
cases for them.

Much more interesting, IMHO, is relational database mapping, because that's 
where the best performance and reliability is for the kind of applications 
PEAK's primarily intended for.

Anyway, because peak.model.Element is based on ZODB4 "Persistent", it 
should be usable with any backend that can handle ZODB4 persistent 
objects.  Thus, if you want to store domain-model objects with ZODB, 
AdaptableStorage, or a subclass of peak.storage.EntityDM, you can.

Thus PEAK, to an even greater extent than ZPatterns, "future-proofs" your 
application domain model.  With ZPatterns, the framework went to extreme 
lengths to be able to simulate "ordinary reality" in Zope when you used 
ZODB as a storage mechanism.  In PEAK, the magic is all in the DM, not in 
the object, so the object is about as "pure" of a domain-model object as 
possible.

Right now, there isn't anything set up to map from pure ZODB data 
structures to DM's in PEAK, so if you wanted to use FileStorage or one of 
the other storages, you'd have to write your own  adapters or 
services.  Probably you'd do this by creating a binding that represented an 
open ZODB connection, and place it in a "ZODB_DM" TransactionComponent 
whose transaction-response methods would call the ZODB transaction methods 
on the connection.  ZODB4's transaction message model is simpler than 
PEAK's, so it would mostly be a matter of ignoring transaction methods ZODB 
doesn't care about.  Anyway, the "ZODB_DM" could then implement 
__getitem__-type services to retrieve objects from the ZODB connection, and 
then you'd just slap some storage.FacadeDM objects into your app that call 
the "ZODB_DM" to retrieve objects of the right kind.

Of course, it may also be that in a Zope 3 application, there'd be better 
ways of creating such a DM than using a direct ZODB connection.  At this 
point, I've done no investigation of through-the-web development with Zope 
3, and it isn't part of our plans at present to provide explicit support 
for such in the base PEAK system.  But if someone (including us) comes up 
with cool ways to use and configure PEAK components through-the-web with 
Zope 3, I imagine we'll accept code contributions.