Support for Developers Using CompoundDoc

For a successful technology,
reality must take precedence over public relations,
for Nature cannot be fooled.
- Richard P. Feynman,
one of the greatest theoretical physicists
of the Twentieth Century

This section supports developers who use and contribute to Web Media Engineering's CompoundDoc technology.

CompoundDoc (cdoc) is a highly advanced compound object container-controller.

With cdoc you can build applications (websites) with the latest standards and technologies several times faster than other methods. Even better, ongoing maintenance is greatly simplified.

Since the Zope environment is an object database, cdoc can leverage the object heirarchies to great advantage. Much of the complexities of the environment are transparent, thus allowing the developer to concentrate on the design rather than the technology.

One caveat before you get started: In most development environments you build linearly. That is, you build one page or functionality and then the next...wash, rinse, repeat. Cdoc works much more like true programming in that you separate the common pieces of pages into separate cdocs. Then embed these pieces into the controlling master cdoc - or more accurately, call them from the master. As you can see, the power of this approach comes from not needing to repeat/duplicate data. If a piece needs changing, it changes all pages whose masters call it - all at once.

And unlike relational databases, the object database's inheritance model allows for flexible and fine-grained control of which parents (masters) use which children (pieces).