September 2000 - Zope-Announce

September 6th Zope Weekly News
by ethan mindlace fremen 06 Sep '00

06 Sep '00

Merely 4 hours past the deadline, the Zope Weekly News lands with a heaping helping of goodies: Rapid Zope Book evolution, lots of fish in the bowl, Zope skin, PTK proliferation, and Zope.org replication. The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors', and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition. You can always get to the most recent Zope Weekly News with "one convenient URL", http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/current And Now For Something Completely Different: <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> Documentation -- by Michel Pelletier This week (a shorty due to Labor day) Amos and I are polishing up spelling, added image and figure semantics to structured text (and extended the HTML and SGML generators to spit them out, yum!). Normalized all the font and style conventions, and started on chapter 1 screenshots. Yeah! I fleshed out a lot of Chapter 9 (Cataloging) also. As always, you can "see the latest and greatest version", http://www.zope.org/Members/michel/ZB/ <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> Zope Status -- by Brian Lloyd Summary Zope 2.2.1 release, progress on dev.zope.org projects Recent highlights ZWN has been spotty lately so to recap, Zope 2.2.1 was released August 25th. Lots and lots of bugs were fixed for 2.2.1, and it seems to have covered the issues that were keeping people from moving to 2.2. There have been two reported problems with custom ZClasses after updating to 2.2.1, but we have not been able to reproduce them and they do not seem to be a general problem. There has been a fair amount of activity on dev.zope.org, with a number of new proposals for things such as session tracking and a unit testing support framework. Chris McDonough gets the prolific-proposal-writer-of-the-week award :) The new security assertion proposal has been made into an active project, and the first draft of the first deliverable (the Zope developer's guide to product security) is "available for review and feedback", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DeclarativeSecurity/ZopeSecurity… There are also a number of proposal where discussion seems to have petered out - we'll need to start looking at these over time and decide how to either get champions to refine them and move them forward or put them in some sort of proposal archive. In other news, FourThought continues to work on the new XMLDocument and will shortly be starting on the XSL Templates project. This week This week we will be starting to firm up a todo list for the next Zope feature release and trying to get the declarative security "user manual" finalized - after that we'll begin implementing the new assertion style for the next feature release. <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> Zope Studio -- by Martijn Pieters Zope Studio Due to other project work, no news this week Skinnable And Localizable Objects After two weeks of holidaying in Scotland, I am back at the keys. Week of 13-08 - Architecture finalised. - Implemented all core objects and code. - Made practically all of Zope Skinnable This Week - Add some code to make skinned files in Zope Core more backward compatible. - Clean up last few objects with recalcitrant, inline DTML, and make then Skinnable. - Split out all strings to make Zope fully translatable. <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> State of the PTK, 2000/09/04 In the weeks since our last report, the PTK community has been quite busy: * Shane Hathaway landed the proposed "next-generation architecture", http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/ZWiki/NewPTKArchitecture, refactoring the "toolkit" as a set of "portal tools", each providing services to other objects in the portal. The tools include: 'portal_membership' -- tracks personalization and owned content, tying them (much more loosely) to the AUTHENTICATED_USER. 'portal_registration' -- implements portal-specific policies for user signup, password generation/mailng, etc. 'portal_workflow' -- encapsulates the workflow policies of the portal 'portal_catalog' -- indexes portal content 'portal_discussions' -- implements portal policies for types of content which are "discussable", and how they are linked to their discussion threads. 'portal_actions' -- list context-specific actions for portal objects. 'portal_undo' -- provide a portal-friendly interface to Zope's undo machinery. Each of these tools is represented as an interface in the 'PTKBase' product, with a sample implementation (typically preserving the "old" policies/semantics) in the 'PTKDemo' or 'DemoPortal' products. The single most attractive feature of the design is that portal managers can replace these tools on a *per-portal basis*. * Fabio Forno provided invaluable aid in debugging the new tools. * One noticeable result of the new architecture is the "renaming of the toolbox", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001341.html to the "actions list", in order to avoid confusion with the "portal tools." * Bill Anderson "released a new version", http://www.zope.org/Members/Bill/News/MembershipRelease-075 of the Membership product, upgrading it to "beta" status. This product uses ZPatterns to manage member registration and logins, and is on a trajectory for eventual reintegration with the new PTK Architecture. * Chris Withers announced "Swishdot", http://www.squishdot.org/968089230/index_html, a successor to the popular Squishdot weblog product, to be built around the PTK. * Tres Seaver "proposed", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001430.html revamping the implementation of the Dublin Core metadata within the PTK, in order to bring it closer into line with the intent of the "spec":http://purl.org/DC. * A "long thread", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001461.html on "hooking" various portal actions resulted in a "proposal", http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-ptk/2000-August/001493.html to create an "event channel" object, 'portal_events', as another tool. PTK Tracker Vitals, 2000/09/04 (since 2000/07/25) Here is is the current state of the tracker:: Type / Status New Closed Current Bug Reports 5 3 26 Feature/Doc Requests 0 0 14 <hr NOSHADE SIZE="0" WIDTH=95%> Zope Web -- by Ethan Fremen ZEO Bakes in Zope.org Oven ZEO is being cooked with Zope.org. This has unfortunately endengered some downtime, as ZEO bugs step out from hiding. The bonus is that Zope.org should be much more stable when this is done, and ZEO users get the benifit of a ZEO that's been put through it's paces. The Caching Machine Zope.org now has its images and files cached by Apache and any downstream cache that cares to do so. This should result in a much faster apparent speed for Zope.org, though we can expect that raw hit-count (as measured by Apache) may decline. Stay tuned for the How-To. Go Forth and Multiply Zope.org is going to be getting a new ZEO client on a geographically remote machine. Once this is tested and solid, Zope.org mirroring will expand to several clients in strategic spots throughout the globe. Watch this space for more details. Distributed Decision Making As a necessary precursor stage for a more active involvement of the community, messages to webmaster(a)zope.org and issues posted in the "zope.org Tracker", http://www.zope.org/Tracker will be sent to the zope web mailing list. Hope to see you there! -EOT-

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Update: Unicode support in Zope
by Toby Dickenson 05 Sep '00

05 Sep '00

I have updated the patch to provide Unicode support in Zope. This patch changes: * Simplified installation instructions, since several bugs have been fixed in the python 2.0 cvs. * Fixed a nasty memory leak. Im confident it is now leak free. * Fixed numerous unicode incompatabilities in Zope's error reporting code that previously made it very hard to debug any unicode related errors. Toby Dickenson tdickenson(a)geminidataloggers.com

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Membership 0.7.5 Released
by Bill Anderson 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

After futzing around with it, I finally have managed to get a new release of Membership out the door. It bears a few caveats: o It is now Beta o Mailing passwords The password form was returning an error which I patched Owner.py to fix. The patch is included below (also sent to zope-dev earlier). It is a simple patch. --update: apparently 2.2.1 doesn't have the problem? o Only moderately Tested New Features/Fixes: USER MANAGEMENT The user manament screens are much improved. The new url is acl_users/ManageUsers. This screen doesn't require use of management screens. it will batch the users into groups of 25, configurable via an input form on the page. The link will take you to a Manage User Pager. This page is a method of the User object. From there you can set the user's Status*, and change roles. There is no delete user function yet. * User status is a hook for a future feature, namely the ability of the manager to set a given user as unable to login. It is not currently implemented, and will be a part of the policy setup. LOGIN/LOGOUT There were a number of issues resolved here. The loginForm now checks to see if you are a Member or manager and redirects to loggedIn if true. It also now correctly updates the login_time fields. CHROME Now utilizes a try-except clause to avoid errors if there is no Chrome object (folder). COMPATIBILITY Zope 2.2.1 Seems to work fine. Primary devel was done here. FInal testing and typo-correction as well was done on a 2.2.1 platform. Zope 2.2.0 Other than I had to patch Owner.py as mentioned, it works fine. ZPAtterns 0.4.2a1 Should work fine. Brief testing indicated no problems. DataSkinAddons Highly reccomended. Use of this product can give you auto-cataloging of Members. Really usefull for member searching. See the Wiki. Forthcoming Work ================ o As soon as I get the patches for PTK Compatibility, and User Deletion, I'll integrate them. o I am currently working on zope help system docs for it. o I would like to automatically add the CatalogingTrigger when the portal is created, as this would make some membership (and management) functions even better. Policies I intend to create a policy system. This will allow the manager to select from different policies. (I am hoping this will make it into 0.8 or 0.9 at the latest. I am aiming at a 1.0 release in the next month or so.) The policy system will allow a drop-in policy method that will control how user passwords are handled. This will include how to deal with forgotten passwords, etc. I am still sketching out the details and mechanics. commentary welcome on zope-dev and/or the discussion page in the Membership Wiki. Patch for Owner.py against 2.2.0 (apply at your own risk!): ---------------------------------------------------------- --- lib/python/AccessControl/Owned-orig.py Mon Sep 4 13:56:52 2000 +++ lib/python/AccessControl/Owned.py Mon Sep 4 13:55:40 2000 @@ -149,6 +149,8 @@ if owner is UnownableOwner: return None + if len(owner)==0: return None + udb, oid = owner root=self.getPhysicalRoot() udb=root.unrestrictedTraverse(udb, None) ---------------------------------------------------------- -- Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are easy to annoy, and have the root password.

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[Ann] SharedResource
by Dieter Maurer 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

Usually, each thread has its own data to minimize interference and to localize synchonization in the transaction commit. However, this makes it difficult to control such data from a single point. E.g. it is very difficult to invalidate cache entries: while there is no problem for a thread to invalidate entries in its own cache, it is very difficult to do the same with the corresponding caches in the other threads. 'Shared Resource' is a module that manages resources shared by all threads. Such resources can be controlled much more easily. A shared resource provides locking capabilities (via Python's RLock) and performs automatic locking for function calls. Access to non-functions is not protected. More information and download: URL:http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/SharedResource.html Dieter

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[Ann]: Cache Controlled SQL methods (CCSQLMethods)
by Dieter Maurer 04 Sep '00

04 Sep '00

Z SQL methods provide a caching mechanism that can greatly reduce the number of database accesses. If, however, the database is changed dynamically, the cache must be used with caution as otherwise stale query results may be returned. CC SQL methods extend Z SQL methods by cache control functions to explicitly control the cache. This allows for the use of much more efficient cache parameters at the expense of explicit cache management. More information and download: URL:http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/CCSQLMethod.html Dieter

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ANN: HappyDoc 0.6
by Doug Hellmann 03 Sep '00

03 Sep '00

Announcing HappyDoc, a Python documentation extraction tool. HappyDoc is a tool for extracting documentation from Python source code. It differs from other such applications by the fact that it uses the parse tree for a module to derive the information used in its output, rather that importing the module directly. This allows the user to generate documentation for modules which need special context to be imported. Version 0.6 Version 0.6 is the first public release. It is described completely on the home page (see just below). It isn't ready for a 1.0 release number yet because I want to add a few more core features before getting to that point. It is stable, however, and is somewhere between a beta and full-release level. Download Download the latest version of HappyDoc from the home page on SourceForge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/happydoc Doc-string Format How does an author write documentation so that it will be marked up and look fancy? This is a perennial question for Python, and seems to have introduced a roadblock into the development of more robust and useful documentation tools. By separating the formatter classes from the docset classes, HappyDoc allows a user to create their own formatter to interpret comments in any way they see fit. The default for the HTMLTableFormatter (the default formatter for HappyDoc) is to treat __doc__ strings as StructuredText. Don't like StructuredText? Write your own formatter that does something different and drop it into place. Documentation not in Doc-strings It is not always desirable to put all documentation in __doc__ strings. Sometime, notably when working with Zope, special meaning is attached to the presence of __doc__ strings. For this reason, and to support existing code which might not have __doc__ strings, HappyDoc will find and extract documentation in Python comments. Comment documentation can contain all of the same formatting as __doc__ strings. The preceding comment marker will be stripped off and the lines will be assembled and treated as a block of StructuredText. To use this feature, it is important to place the comments **before** the named object which they describe. In this example: # # Class documentation goes here # class ClassWithNoDocStrings: "Using __doc__ strings overrides comment documentation." def method1(self, params): "This method uses a __doc__ string." pass # # Method2 does not use a __doc__ string. # def method2(self): pass The output would include the __doc__ strings for the class and for method1. It would also make it appear that method2 had a __doc__ string with the contents "Method2 does not use a __doc__ string." Feedback on HappyDoc is welcome to doughellmann(a)bigfoot.com. Doug Hellmann

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Experimental ZODB packages
by A.M. Kuchling 01 Sep '00

01 Sep '00

I've packaged the ZODB using the Distutils. There are 3 packages, containing the ZODB itself, ExtensionClass, and a few miscellaneous Python modules that are required. Installation instructions are at http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/zodb/install.html The packages themselves are available through FTP from: ftp://starship.python.net/pub/crew/amk/zodb/ This repackaging is aimed at people who want to use the ZODB in their own programs without using other Zope features; it will save the effort of figuring out which bits of Zope need to get installed. The packaging is still experimental, so please inform me if you run into problems during the installation process. Future plans are to merge the 3 packages into a single package, and also package ZEO. --amk

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