[railroad-dev] Railroad features for Plone developers?

[Guido Goldstein]

[ Sent it to Priyadarshan directly first, which was an accident. ]

Hi!

Priyadarshan wrote:
> [Repost with proper subject. Sorry]
> 
> Hi,
> 
> we are are in the process of building an audio/video library
> based on Plone, and we installed RailRoad 0.21 on our stage
> server to test it and see how it can help us.

You might be interested in the Plone application we (Infrae)
did already.
This project is available via svn under:
  http://codespeak.net/svn/rr/PloneRailroadVideoLibrary/

The latest stable was:
  http://codespeak.net/svn/rr/PloneRailroadVideoLibrary/PloneRailroadVideoLibrary-0.1.2

> The installation went quite smoothly, but now we are
> wondering how can RailRoad help us. We are using Plone LDAP
> authentication, so we would not need RailRoad server auth
> feature, and we are going to use Plone to store and search
> the meta-data, so we do not need the SQL feature.

As already said, the Railroad server authorization is *not* an independent
authorization. It relies on the authorization of the so called client CMS, which
uses the server as backend.
So, as depicted in the server doc/rr-requests.p(df|ng), the client CMS has to
provide the authorization; the RR server simply asks the owning CMS if the
user requesting access to a resource is allowed.

For now, if you want to use the authorization feature of the RR server,
you have to have the database feature enabled.

More details on that in doc/cms_integration.txt, section 4.

But the whole database story will change.
Trust me, I've insider infos on that. :)

> Which additional features, beside establishing a relationship
> between an archetype based content-type and a webdav
> repository, RailRoad offers to help Plone developers to built
> webdav-based media libraries?

The main feature is that this combination of Zope and Apache/WebDav
allows a lot of concurrent downloads w/o blocking Zope threads (of which
you normally don't have much to spare).

Another, for now not very prominent, feature is that you can share the
resources between different clients, including the meta-data.
But this is really a different story ...

Regards
  Guido G.
-- 
Guido Goldstein
Infrae, Rotterdam
http://www.infrae.com/