Re: [Modeling-users] Greetings and questions

[Sebastien B. <sbi...@us...>]

        Hi,

Matthew Patton <pa...@dm...> wrote:
> Hi,
> 	I came across Modeling as a result of discovering WebObjects just
> recently.  I read through the docs on how to build web apps in WebObjects
> and how to build and use Enterprise Objects, and I was very pleased with
> the well-designed architecture of the EOF.  It truly is the most
> sophisticated and powerful Enterprise Object architecture that I have
> seen.

I know the feeling, and that's why the project started, when I had to
switch to python+Zope!

[...]
> 	So, I turned to Python, and I discovered your excellent initiative
> to take the great ideas in WebObjects and make them freely available
> through the GPL.  What you are working on is exactly what I need, and I
> want to try to understand how I can best utilize your work.
> 	I have the following questions:
>=20
> 1. Is it your long-term goal to try to reproduce in Python everything that
> Apple did in their EOF?
>=20
> 2. Roughly speaking, how much of their functionality have you reproduced
> to this point, and what remains?

It is my goal to keep enhancing the framework as users' requests come
in. Sometimes this can take a lot of time, but the dev. is oriented by
users requests. And I do not like the term "reproduce", because therte's
no reason to blindly stick to what the EOF does, or how a particular
pb. is addressed. For example, there's a patch that will soon be
integrated into the framework that allows dynamic building of the models
AND the associated classes. The fact is, python offers sometimes more
choices than ObjC or Java does --at the cost of performance sometimes,
but that's probably also the coder's fault :/

As far as "how much functionality" still needs to be done, I have recently
posted a little roadmap for immediate/mid-term future development, see it a=
t:
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=3D3739727&forum_id=
=3D10674

You can also refer to the TODO list, distributed w/ the framework and
available at:
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/modeling/ProjectModeling/Modeling/TOD=
O?rev=3D1.16&view=3Dauto

  (Keep in mind, however, that cleaning and publishing this todo list is a
  todo item too :)

Hopefully those two elements will help you see what remains. Roughly,
I'll summarize that in: flattened relationships, vertical mapping,
compound PKs, support for stored procedures, allow delegates to
fine-tune any part of the processes, add more db adaptors.

> 3. I understand you use Zope as your application server for your test
> projects.  Do you have any code for a sample project that utilizes your
> O/R layer with Zope?  What I mean is, do you have a web program that
> allows the user to interact with the DB using Modeling?  Your examples in
> the tests/ dir seemed be just the setting up of the Modeling classes, not
> the actual usage of them in a program.  I noticed you also discussed this
> in your user guide, but it would be really helpful to see all of the code
> for a full project.  How does Zope compare to the web components approach
> of WebObjects?

Yeap, the tests/ dir contains test units for the whole framework, so it
is not that useful as an example of use... Unfortunately, there is no
sample app. Making a tutorial is on the TODO list, but at this point I
must admit that I lack time for that. In other words, help needed! and
I'll be happy to participate in the design of a sample app.  supporting
a tutorial ;)

Back on Zope: I've no preference and usually start to design my apps. in
pure python (test-driven dev.), than I take whatever action is needed to
do the GUI and in case this is a web-app, I usually use Zope, yes. I'd
say that you can do very clean dev. w/ Zope, the C & V part of MVC being
done in, resp., products and products' pages (ZPT e.g.). This is quite
difficult to compare WO to Zope, but both application servers have a
clean and elegant architecture and allow elegant developments ;) with WO
as a complete IDE at hand that Zope do not really have, but that's not
that important (at least to my eyes).

> 4. As a follow-up question, have you written any full-fledged
> production-level products using Modeling?

Absolutely, they are up and running for more than a year now, you'll
find a description here: http://modeling.sourceforge.net/status.html

Maybe someone else can also comment here?-)

> 5. I noticed that Apple has the full API to WebObjects accessible online.
> Did you have any other sources for figuring out how to reverse engineer
> WebObjects?

I'm sure you do not mean "reverse engineer" (which is illegal), rather
"understanding the underlying concepts", don't you?-)) Apart from
Apple's resources available online, I can't see any source --but I've
quit developping w/ WO for a long time now, so I'm not the right person
to ask that. Maybe you could ask the community at omnigroup.com e.g.

  Hopefully the answers were not too short, I did not have much time to
  answer --feel free to ask for more, esp. after your first experiments.
  I'll be offline some days from now, and will be back in the middle of
  next week.


-- S=E9bastien.