Plone/SQLAlch/Python Contract

Martin Aspeli optilude at gmx.net
Tue Jun 5 21:07:43 UTC 2007


Charles Pace wrote:
> I am looking to have both of these items complete in the next week.

Just some general feedback ....

> Prior Art Search (~$1.5k)
> ------------------------------------
> 
> Create a python application that will walk a web site with
> bibliographic data, gathering author names. These names and their
> papers' names will be stored in a couple of DBMS tables. Application
> will keep track of how often it has crawled and extracted data from
> these web sites. When the web sites change (date/diff) they will be
> crawled again and new information will be added to the database tables
> (and timestamp noted in table entries).
> 
> A second application will take the authors' names and search the
> USPTO.gov patent database for these authors and retrieve possible
> patent entries associated with those authors and store these entries
> in a table.
> 
> A GUI will be used to list the authors and their respective
> papers/patents. A 5-star rating will be used to rate the "match"
> through user input. Additionally, a button will be used by the user to
> indicate a mismatch.
> 
> The USPTO queries will be performed on a schedule, and redundant
> information will be suppressed from database insertion.
> 
> All code is to be written in Python in the Plone framework, and
> database operations should all use SQLAlchemy.

I'd say a week to write, test and develop this sounds ambitious, but I 
may have over-estimated the scope.

> Small DBMS Example (~$1.0k)
> ------------------------------------
> 
> Take create statements for five tables and create the ArchGenXML UML
> diagram. From this, use the Archetype tools to generate the Plone
> product for this UML. As a final step, create the SQLAlchemy code to
> back the product content to a postgress DB with the same tables you
> started with.
> 
> In other words, we would like to have a Plone product for a set of
> tables that is generated from a UML diagram, and then backed by the
> same tables using SQLAlchemy.
> 
> We would then be able to change the UML and re-generate the Plone
> product - resulting in another ZODB backed set of objects. And, after
> having the first SQLAlchemy mapping, we would then be able to more
> easily change the ZODB over to SQLAlchemy/Postgress.

$1,000 and 1 week to do this sounds very, very ambitious. You'd need to 
write something to render XMI files, parse Create Table statements and 
then write an Archetypes storage engine for SQLAlchemy (which I believe 
to be possible, but not trivial). This won't buy you changeability, by 
the way - you may be able to store field values in an RDBMS, but you 
will not be able to switch off the ZODB, and the content items would 
still live in the ZODB, where their main metadata and location 
information would live.

I also don't see what the UML diagram buys you here.

Martin

-- 
Acquisition is a jealous mistress





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