February 2000 - Zope-Announce

Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 10 Feb '00

10 Feb '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening. Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively. Suggestions for ZWN items are happily accepted. Please mail them to <mike(a)digicool.com>, put 'ZWN' somewhere in the subject and remember to include URLs. Announcements * Zope 2.1.4 has been released. The blame goes to Evan Simpson, who pointed out a problem which would allow people to construct links to a Zope server such that it would cause JScript (or other HTML-embeddable scripts) to be executed in the user's browser. This script would appear to come from the Zope server. While this is not too terribly dangerous (your browser doesn't have any security holes, right?), all users are encouraged to upgrade. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.4/Zope_214_release New Releases * "brianh" has been given custodianship of the Ultraseek DA product. This is a Zope Database Adapter which provides an interface to Infoseek's Ultraseek Server search engine. http://www.zope.org/Members/brianh/UltraseekDA * "ngarcia" announced the first public release of the Wampum Generator, a CyberCash Connector for Zope. This product gives application developers the ability to process Internet credit card transactions in Zope. http://www.zope.org/Members/ngarcia/WampumGenerator Updates * Digital Creations has released an updated version of the Sybase Database Adapter. It's hoped that this release fixes the memory leaks of the prior version. http://www.zope.org/Products/DA/SybaseDA/ * "Drew" has updated the ZPhotoAlbum product. This product presents pages of ZPhotos (images) scaled to the user-specified thumbnail size. The present version is 0.4.3. http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo/ * Jonothan Farr <jfarr(a)real.com> updated his LocalFS product. This product allows Zope to serve files out of (shockingly enough) the local filesystem. Additionally, it can serve from network shares if you are running Zope on a Windows machine. http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/LocalFS Zope.org items * Chris McDonough <chrism(a)digicool.com> has crafted a gentle and easily digested introduction to Zope he's called, "Gain Zope Enlightenment By Grokking Object Orientation". If you are _not_ a computer scientist, geek or Python programmer, this seems to be the place for you to start. He does a wonderful job of answering a very difficult question, "What is Zope?" At the end, the complete novice should have a decent understanding of how Zope works, what an object is and what it means to publish one, and how these objects work. http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/gainenlightenment * "muesli" created a HowTo which explains the 'domains' security feature of user objects. This allows you to restrict access to specific hosts, domains, or IP addresses. http://www.zope.org/Members/muesli/AuthByAddress * "jec" posted a HowTo which explains automating the starting and stopping (at startup and shutdown) of a Zope server on a Red Hat system. http://www.zope.org/Members/jec/startstop_howto_html * "vernier" has written a HowTo on creating custom Zope Debian packages. http://www.zope.org/Members/vernier/debian * "lalo" wrote a HowTo which describes how to use cron to trigger events on a Zope server. http://www.zope.org/Members/lalo/cron * Jens Vagelpohl <jens(a)digicool.com> has distilled the essence of his experience creating the Zope Demo CD which was distributed at IPC8 and created a HowTo so you can create one, too. These CDs work on both Windows and Linux systems. On a Windows system, the Zope server can start right off the CD, and a web browser can automatically be launched to view the server's content. All this without writing a single byte to the user's hard drive. http://www.zope.org/Members/jens/docs/zope_on_cdrom * Chris Petrilli <pertilli(a)digicool.com> posted a proposal titled "A Confidence Mechanism in User Role Management". The idea is to make Zope Authentication more flexible than all-or-nothing. There is a discussion about this proposal in the Zope-PTK mailing list. http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/ConfidenceMetric http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-February/000169.html Corrections * Last week, the editor-in-chief of O'Reilly was mistakenly called "Frank Wilson". His name is in fact Frank Willison. -- Mike Pelletier.

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Zope 2.1.4 released...
by Brian Lloyd 09 Feb '00

09 Feb '00

Hi all, Zope 2.1.4 has been released. It can be downloaded from Zope.org at: http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.4/ This update prevents the REQUEST object from being traversable by web clients. While this feature was useful for debugging, Evan Simpson noted a potential security issue that could allow web authors to play client scripting tricks and make them appear (to the user) to be coming from a Zope site. While we know of no instances of this happening and the actual security of the Zope site's data is not affected by this, we do recommend that you upgrade to 2.1.4 to avoid any problems. Also (I know many of you are already thinking it :), we are working on a way to distribute "patch" releases for things like this to make updates easier. Until then, for those who _really_ just want to patch your installation you can replace the file lib/python/ZPublisher/BaseRequest.py in your installation with the one from the 2.1.4 distribution and restart your Zope instance. Brian Lloyd brian(a)digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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Xmlt 1.10 - generating html documents with a common layout
by Anders Andersen 07 Feb '00

07 Feb '00

Xmlt 1.10 - generating html documents with a common layout Xmlt (pronounced ex-melt) merges a layout description with the document contents and generates a html document. Xmlt (Xmlt Merges Layout and Text) uses the DocumentTemplate module from Zope [1] to merge a layout (described in a dtml-file) and the text (found in xmlt-files) into a html document. Its main purpose is to separate the layout description from the contents description of html documents and to reuse the layout description in a large number of documents. Xmlt is originally written to maintain my personal web pages, but it might be useful for other web page maintainers and html document authors too. Xmlt is available for free with code, documents and examples. Send any comments to me (my email address is found in the signature below). I guess it is a little bit strange to use Zope technology to generate static web pages, but I found dtml very useful in the context of a lot of documents with similar layout. I use good old make to generate and install my web pages after I have done any layout or contents changes (I will consider to trash make when the Software Carpentry Open Source Design Competition [2] has come up with a new tool-set that can replace good old make :-). Xmlt, a user guide and some examples are available from the Python starship: ftp://starship.python.net/pub/crew/anders/xmlt/ ftp://starship.python.net/pub/crew/anders/xmlt/doc/xmlt.html Anders, [1] http://www.zope.org/ [2] http://www.software-carpentry.com/ -- Anders Andersen - <mailto:aa@computer.org> - <http://w3.to/andersen/>

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New HowTo: Gain Enlightenment by Grokking Object Orientation
by Chris McDonough 06 Feb '00

06 Feb '00

I've put up a new HowTo at http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTo/gainenlightenment titled "How To Gain Enlightenment By Grokking Object Orientation". It's useful if you're a Perl or ASP programmer first coming to Zope or if object oriented programming is new to you. -- Chris McDonough Digital Creations, Inc. Zope - http://www.zope.org

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Zope Weekly News Rides Again
by Mike Pelletier 02 Feb '00

02 Feb '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening. Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively. Suggestions for ZWN items are happily accepted. Please mail them to <mike(a)digicool.com>, put 'ZWN' somewhere in the subject and remember to include URLs. Announcements * ActiveState has announced it will be offering industrial-strength commercial Python support. ActiveState is renowned for their Perl support and development tools. The press release, linked below, includes comments from Paul Everitt. http://www.activestate.com/press/releases/python.htm * Frank Wilson, editor-in-chief at O'Reilly, presently has quite a lot of commentary on the IPC8, Python, Zope and Digital Creations in his "Frankly Speaking" column. http://www.oreilly.com/frank/ * O'Reilly recently launched their new portal, O'Reilly Network. The prestigious first feature is an interview with Paul Everitt, which explores some of the hidden gotchas and bonuses of opening up your software. The interview is available as text and three flavours of audio: High bandwidth RealAudio, low bandwidth RealAudio, and MP3. Nice! http://www.oreillynet.com/ http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/01/25/interview/index.html * You can now follow ZopeStudio (aka the Zope-Mozilla Initiative) as it evolves by tracking the new ZopeMozilla CVS. For more information, see: http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-announce/2000-January/000102.html * The Zope Portal Toolkit (PTK) is now a Real Live Product, and is also avalialable to be tracked by CVS. See the post in the zope-ptk(a)zope.org list. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-February/000111.html * Chris McDonough <chrism(a)digicool.com> reported ZDNet UK's analysis of open source application servers Zope and Midgard. http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/Links/zdnetuk-appserver * Trey Seaver <tseaver(a)palladion.com> announced the commencement of the Zope Guru of the Week "contest". Trey even made the application handling the ZGotW downloadable. http://zope.palladion.com/demos/ZGotW * "jwashin" submitted a "ZClasses Survey/quiz product". It is still undergoing development, and contributions are welcome. http://www.zope.org/Members/jwashin/Survey * Geeknews.org published an interesting interview with Rick Collette, head developer for SPIRO Linux. In it, Rick explains the reasoning behind including Zope as a distribution component. http://www.geeknews.org/features/interviews/spirolinuxinterview.html * Linux Weekly News offered the following link to ZopeNewbies' coverage of the IPC8 and it's Zope Track. Photos! http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/ New Releases * Zope 2.1.3 has been released. This update contains fixes for a race condition that could cause Zope to hang on very high-traffic sites, two database packing bugs, and a bug that caused Zope to sometimes hang instead of shutting down when the shutdown function was accessed over a very fast network. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.3/ * "ngps" announced the availability of a very exciting product, "M2Crypto", which allows ZServer (and so Zope) to speak SSL natively. http://www.zope.org/Members/ngps/m2crypto_news * RainDog submitted version 0.0.1 of TTImage. TTImage renders arbitrary text to images on-the-fly. http://www.zope.org/Members/RainDog/TTImage * "haqa" has contributed "Favourite Links", a ZClass-based product which presumably manages a collection of links. http://www.zope.org/Members/haqa/ZLinks Updates and Patches * "kslee" contributed Zope patch which allows you to select from a list of default contents when creating a DTML Method/Document. http://www.zope.org/Members/kslee/DTML_Repository_Patch * "faassen" released version 0.2 of ZFormulator. http://www.zope.org/Members/faassen/ZFormulator/ * "phd" announced that mod_pcgi2 has reached version 1.0.0. http://www.zope.org/Members/phd/mod_pcgi2 * "jephte" updated jcNTUserFolder to version 0.0.2. http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/jcNTUserFolder * "kslee" spent some time hacking on ZCatalog's splitter.py and the result was Voodoo Kludge Splitter. The splitter is what determines word breaks for full text searches. The Voodoo Kludge Splitter allows full text searches of non-ASCII content, such as Korean, Japanese and Chinese. There are caveats to be aware of. http://www.zope.org/Members/kslee/VoodooKludgeSplitter/ * Evan Simpson <evan(a)4-am.com> has brought his SiteAccess product up to version 1.0.0. This is the first stable release. SiteAccess allows you to use virtual hosting to make non-root Zope objects appear to be the root of your website. http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess * "htrd" contributed a Zope hack which "provides support for wide character strings in ZPublisher, property pages, and property sheets." http://www.zope.org/Members/htrd/wstring * "jules" contributed a HowTo which describes the creation of "Smarter" forms. The idea is to prevent the user from ever having to go "Back" by representing forms with prior inputs already filled in. http://www.zope.org/Members/jules/smarterforms_html/smarterforms_html * Another HowTo from "jules", this one describes auto-starting Zope on boot on a SuSE 6.3 system. http://www.zope.org/Members/jules/SuSE-6.3_html Zope.org items * Chris Petrilli <petrilli(a)digicool.com> has made all the slides from the tutorials he offered at the Zope Track of IPC8 available online. http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/Presentations/ * "kusako" contributed a Tip which explains how to catalog a group of properties as though they were one. http://www.zope.org/Members/kusako/AdvancedCataloging * Miklos Nemeth <nemeth(a)iqsoft.hu> submitted "How-To: Using Emacs with Zope on RedHat 6.1". It appears to walk the user through using Emacs as a Zope development environment. http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/usingEmacsWithZope * "rbickers" wrote an excellent HowTo on Running Zope on BeOS. The HowTo includes links to a suitable Zope binary. http://www.zope.org/Members/rbickers/Zope_on_BeOS * Continuing a thread, Jeffrey Shell <jeffrey(a)digicool.com> wrote a similar HowTo for MacOS X. http://www.zope.org/Members/jshell/buildingZopeOnMacOSXServer * "jephte" submitted a HowTo describing how to make Zope work in remote user mode (this is, making the webserver deal with Authentication) in conjunction with IIS. http://www.zope.org/Members/jephte/HOWTO/IIS_and_Zope_in_REMOTE_USER_mode * Chris Pertilli <petrilli(a)digicool.com> has started a Z SQL Method FAQ. He is accepting additional questions and answers. http://www.zope.org/Members/petrilli/ZSQLFAQ * Chris McDonough <chrism(a)digicool.com> wrote an EXTENSIVE HowTo describing the process of installing Zope and upgrading an existing Zope installation, complete with screenshots. If you are having difficulty getting Zope off the ground, this looks like the place to start. http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/zopeinstall/ZOPE-INSTALL-HOWTO * Miklos Nemeth <nemeth(a)iqsoft.hu> also contributed a HowTo about using the SQL Sessions product. SQL Sessions allows you to store arbitrary per-visitor state in an SQL database. http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/usingSQLSession * John Udell <udell(a)monad.net> wrote "How-To: A <dtml-calendar> example", which demonstrates managing per-date data with the <dtml-calendar> tag presenting the interface. http://www.zope.org/Members/judell/CalendarTagExample * "anthony" submitted "How-To: Choosing to store data in SQL vs ZODB". In it, he supplies a number of questions you can ask yourself to determine whether to keep application data in the Zope database or an external one. http://www.zope.org/Members/anthony/sql_vs_ZODB * Miklos Nemeth <nemeth(a)iqsoft.hu> has written another HowTo targeted at RedHat 6.1 users: "Zope and Apache on RedHat 6.1". http://www.zope.org/Members/nemeth/howtos/zopeandapacherh61 * Another Chris McDonough <chrism(a)digicool.com> HowTo: "Using the Zope Debug Log to Track Down Hangs". This HowTo includes a log file analyser. http://www.zope.org/Members/mcdonc/HowTos/DEBUG-LOG * Jim Fulton has made three of his IPC8 presentations available. They are "Introduction to the Zope Object Database", "Acquisition Algebra", and "Zope Architecture". http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/ZODB3News http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/AqAlgNews http://www.zope.org/Members/jim/Info/IPC8/ZopeArchNews -- Mike Pelletier.

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