[Twisted-Python] A proposal for simple remote object editing (Twisted and ZODB integration)

[L. Daniel Burr]

Robert,

On Tue, 27 Jun 2006 13:31:56 -0500, Robert Gravina <robert at gravina.com>  
wrote:

[snip description of current work]

> Back to the ZODB... what would be extremely useful is if clients could  
> get an objects from the ZODB sent down to them, edit the attributes and  
> call the methods, and sent it back and *have it be the original instance  
> again*. Sort of like the best of both words of Referenceables and  
> Copyables. Of course, this doesn't have to have anything to do with the  
> ZODB, it was just my motivation for this idea. Any object could be sent  
> down the wire, edited, and sent back having the original instance  
> updated.
>

What does "have it be the original instance again" really mean?  It sounds
as though you simply want the distinction between Referenceables and
Copyables to disappear.  I smell security issues in here somewhere.

> My questions are:
>
> 1) Is there any way to achieve this using Twisted the way things are?
>

I don't know for a certainty, but my guess is that there isn't any
out-of-box solution for this.  You'd have to do this yourself, I think.

> 2) Is my copying-across-the-dict a good enough solution, and I should  
> just forget about the whole thing?
>

I think you really want ZEO, but I may be misunderstanding your aims.

> 3) I hear Zope 3 contains some kind of Twisted integration. For the life  
> of me I can't find any information about this on the web, and I even  
> bought a book on Zope 3 recently and the only reference to Twisted is  
> that you can use Twisted Web instead of Zope's ZServer to service web  
> requests.
>

The twisted/zope integration is really just so that zope 3 can start
using twisted as a server (web, ftp, etc.).  I don't think the zope
community has any immediate plans to use twisted as a framework.

Jim Fulton has said he wants to get out of the server business, and
twisted lets him do that.  I don't think he is particularly interested
in using twisted to build his apps, as he already has his own framework.

> 4) I've been toying with Divmod Axiom, and I see there is Twisted  
> Persisted (but can't find much info on it), plus there is Twisted  
> Enterprise, but that is too close to relational databases for my liking.  
> Do any of these projects have integration like this?
>

As a person who uses Axiom for his current project, I say "Use Axiom!".
That said, you can't use Axiom with ZODB, or vice versa.  Axiom is a
really great alternative to ZODB, and one that will work much more
nicely with twisted, hence my endorsement of it.

> 5) Does anyone else think this is a cool idea and like to see it  
> implemented?
>

I don't have any interest in such a thing, personally, but then again,
I don't use ZODB, and hope never to do so ;)

L. Daniel Burr