Alexander Limi brought up the discussion again, by mailing some of the Zope Community luminaries. I’m glad to be amongst those. I had come up with a high-level list of things that would need to happen before. So here are some more quick thoughts about what else would be needed to get Plone running on Google App Engine:

me: i mean, i had made a list of things already

Alexander: yup, but I’m sure there are more

me: those are the high-level yeah
for example, you can run with the python security policy
implementation, so that’s one thing less
acquisition needs to be ported though, or at least faked :)

Alexander: what about the __parent stuff that just landed in 2.11 (or
was it trunk?)

me: that’s implemented in Acquisition yeah
ExtensionClass, Acquisition and persistence are the 3 top modules
oh, BTree is a nasty one
probably better off trying to go to a non-ZODB based Zope by that time

Alexander: yeah, I suspect we should ditch the ZODB if we want to be
on App Engine

me: at the same time, there’s this project about porting Zope to Jython
if that’s successfull, it should run on pure python too
or maybe not, depends on which way this student goes

Alexander: right, the App Engine concerns are more than just what runs
as pure Python, though :)
database, memory usage, etc

me: but, what about the relstorage backend?
idea

Alexander: that’s why I included Martijn ;)

me: ok
so, yeah, those are my ideas
can’t think of much else

Alexander: ok
that’s a great start, thanks
now make sure the email or blog post covers the additional thoughts ;)

me: maybe the DirectoryViews stuff
the filesystem access is restricted right?
but i guess you can read files just fine?

Alexander: I have no idea :)

me: oh, k
number of files would be a problem
we should have all products running off zipped eggs by now
that would reduce the amount of files
but unfortunately no one worked on that

Alexander: I have to run, but feel free to continue in email ;)

me: ok

Alexander: trunk of Plone is mostly eggs, no?

me: but nothing is ready to load files off zipped eggs

Alexander: I see

me: i believe mcdonough did some work on that

Alexander: ok, see you later :)

me: ok
zcml would need to grow support for zipped eggs too

If you have more ideas, feel free to comment.