Content types

A survey is a hierarchical questionnaire. This maps very well on the hierarchical structure used for Plone content, which allows us to reuse the standard Plone interface for content editing.

Technology

Standard Plone content types are based on Archetypes. These are very flexible and well supported, but have some downsides that make them undesirable for Euphorie:

• Archetypes objects are large, which makes them slow to load from the ZODB, and reduces cache efficiency.
• Archetypes does not handle unicode text very well; while it stores data in unicode its API always uses encoded strings.
• Archetypes has lots of unneeded complexity and few tests, which can make debugging problems or extending it very hard.

For these reasons the implementation is based on Dexterity instead. Dexterity offers light weight objects, a clean design and has excellent test coverage, making it an excellent basis.