RE: [Pythoncard-users] Re: ZODB Persistence

> From: Dan Shafer
>
> I'm not sure I really care of ZODB is the native PythonCard data
> model. What I need is the ability to interact with a ZODB. More
> specifically, I need to craft PythonCard apps that retrieve data from
> and write data back to Zope. I've long since standardized on Zope as
> my app and content management framework and I have zero interest in
> changing that at this point. I have created a number of sites for
> friends and clients in Zope and we now want to create app-style
> interfaces to get at the data stored there. For me, then, PythonCard
> in that set of apps becomes a UI toolkit with smarts that lets me do
> things the browser won't.
>
> Kevin says this is more like screen scraping than object storage. OK.
> Whatever I call it, it's what I want.

Here's one definition that popped out of a google search for "screen
scraping"
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/screen-scraping.html

So just a clarification to my original comment. It is only screen scraping
if the only data you can extract from the database is HTML and you have to
then parse that to get any meaning out of the content.

The obvious problem with a screen scraping solution such as getting stock
quotes from a page like: http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=intc&d=v1 instead of
from a web service that returns XML... is that if Yahoo changes the HTML
your parsing code for extracting the stock quote will probably break.

Hopefully your ZODB database contains real fields and is only turned into
HTML once it goes through some template processing.

ka