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| -rw-r--r-- | README.txt | 25 |
1 files changed, 19 insertions, 6 deletions
diff --git a/README.txt b/README.txt index 101d810de..3c1f7684b 100644 --- a/README.txt +++ b/README.txt @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ code using pattern matching against URL components. Examples: It is however possible to map URLs to code differently, using object graph traversal. The venerable Zope and CherryPy web frameworks offer -traversal-based URL dispatch. ``repoze.bfg`` also provides +graph-traversal-based URL dispatch. ``repoze.bfg`` also provides graph-traversal-based dispatch of URLs to code. Graph-traversal based dispatching is useful if you like the URL to be representative of an arbitrary hierarchy of potentially heterogeneous items. @@ -53,6 +53,12 @@ an edge of the graph. So a URL like ``http://example.com/a/b/c`` can be thought of as a graph traversal on the example.com site through the edges "a", "b", and "c". +Finally, if you're willing to treat your application models as a graph +that can be traversed, it also becomes trivial to provide "row-level +security" (in common relational parlance): you just attach a security +declaration to each instance in the graph. This is not as easy in +frameworks that use URL-based dispatch. + Graph traversal is materially more complex than URL-based dispatch, however, if only because it requires the construction and maintenance of a graph, and it requires the developer to think about mapping URLs @@ -60,11 +66,14 @@ to code in terms of traversing the graph. (How's *that* for self-referential! ;-) That said, for developers comfortable with Zope, in particular, and comfortable with hierarchical data stores like ZODB, mapping a URL to a graph traversal it's a natural way to think -about creating a web application. In essence, the choice to use graph -traversal vs. URL dispatch is largely "religious" in some sense and -often doesn't make sense for completely "square" data, but old habits -die hard for folks used to graph-traversal-based lookup. -``repoze.bfg`` is for those folks. +about creating a web application. + +In essence, the choice to use graph traversal vs. URL dispatch is +largely religious in some sense. Graph traversal dispatch probably +just doesn't make any sense when you possess completely "square" data +stored in a relational database. However, when you have a +hierarchical data store, it can provide advantages over using +URL-based dispatch. Similarities with Other Frameworks ---------------------------------- @@ -300,6 +309,10 @@ A typical simple ``repoze.bfg`` application consists of four things: An application must be a Python package (meaning it must have an __init__.py and it must be findable on the PYTHONPATH). +We don't describe any security in our very simple sample application. +Security is optional in a repoze.bfg application; it needn't be used +until necessary. + views.py ~~~~~~~~ |