The Zope News for August 31, 2001
by Chris McDonough (chrism(a)zope.com)
Also available via http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/ZWN-2001-08-31
Welcome to the Zope News for August 31, 2001! The top stories this
time around include: Zope 2.4.1 beta 1 released, a new ZEO beta is
announced, Paul forks off a kid, versioning is hot, Tim Peters gets
paid, Zope for Mac OS X, a big fat client, and a Zope-XPath marriage
is proposed.
And now for something completely different...
Front Matter
It would have been an excellent several weeks in the Zope community
if it hadn't been for the SciFi Channel's re-running of the entire
Farscape series on a daily basis (every night, 8pm... well, at least
in the US). The actual viewing and discussion of the show has so
sapped productivity lately that we're sending Ken Manheimer to
forcibly dismantle the transmitter next week. Wish him luck. ;-)
Seriously, however, a few people asked last week for me to link the
blurb topics in this document's overview section to the respective
items in the news text due to the sheer size of this thing. I would
have done this, but, well... I didn't. ;-) Sorry!
Zope Core Software Development and Releases
Zope 2.4.1 beta 1, a minor bugfix release, was released on August
17. It's available from http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.4.1b1 .
Jeremy Hylton announces a new ZEO (Zope Enterprise Objects) beta
release: "At long last, the fourth and final beta release of ZEO 1.0
is available at http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO. I expect to
release 1.0 final next week." ZEO turns the Zope object system into
a distributed architecture, allowing multiple processors, machines,
and networks to act as one website. It also basically rules the
universe, as far as I'm concerned.
Software Development Proposals and Projects
Michael Bernstein continues to gain momentum (and lots of comments)
on his SecurityJihad proposal, which aims to tighten out-of-the-box
Zope security for developers. See
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SecurityJihad .
Dylan Jay proposes to allow Zope objects to be queried via XPath.
See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ZDOMXPath . His
PrototypeObjects proposal, though not particularly new, is also very
interesting.
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/PrototypeObjects
Shane Hathaway and Jim Fulton's Component Architecture project is
turning out to be the genesis of a future "paradigm shift" for Zope
development and has received a lot of discussion lately. See
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/RecentChan….
BackTalk is a system based on Zope which allows users to comment on
prestructured booklike content through the web. I put BackTalk out
a while back on SourceForge, but I haven't really advertised it.
I'll do so now. http://sourceforge.net/projects/backtalk/ . This
is unspported software, is sparsely documented, and is available
only through CVS at the moment. Comments appreciated. A BackTalk
demo is available at http://serenade.digicool.com:8187/ZopeBook .
Design credits go to Bruce Eckel, Bill Venners, and Kent Hoxsey.
Developers wanted!
Ken Manheimer produces a comprehensive set of requirements for Zope
versioning. This appears to be a step in the direction of encoding
a revision-specification scheme into URLs, which looks a little
weird at first glance.
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/VersioningForContentManagement
David Shaw makes his second beta binary release of Zope for the Mac
OS X platform. It includes Python, his lickable GUI Zope control tool
(http://homepage.mac.com/dshaw/ for screenshots), ZEO, and some
other assorted goodies. Download it from http://homepage.mac.com/osx/
The Zope Fat Client project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zfc/),
run mostly by our friends at NIP Ltd. is a project aimed at.. well,
in their own words, "The Zope Fat Client project aims to explore the
space of an interactive and potentially distributed Zope client to
compliment Zope's current paradigms."! That's a mouthful. But it
looks interesting!
Security Notices
No security notices since the last News issue.
Documentation Development and Releases
A CMF FAQ was started on the "dogbowl":
http://cmf.zope.org/Members/tseaver/how_tos/faq_announce .
I don't think it has been mentioned before in the Zope News, but the
documentation folks at Zope Corporation continue to kick out new
"Articles" which highlight hands-on use of some of Zope's core
technologies. For more info, see
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles . The latest article
from Michel Pelletier is about using Zope with Amaya, Dreamweaver,
and other WYSIWYG HTML tools.
Hernan Foffani updates ZopeSHELF for Zope 2.4! The Zope Shelf is a
compilation of the Zope Book, the Deveveloper's Guide, the How-Tos,
the Articles and an HTML and CSS Ref Guide in Microsoft HTMLHelp
format. http://www.orgmf.com.ar/condor/zopestuff.html
News Summaries
No news summaries since the last News issue.
Zope Corporation Goings-On
No real news to tell on the "opening" of the Zope CVS. We're still
waiting on a wet signature document. The project makes its home,
however, at
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZopeCVSMigration/FrontPage.
Paul Everitt, Zope Corporation principal, is the father of Charles
Merlo Everitt, some-odd pounds, some-odd ounces born a few days ago.
I'm as usual a little hazy on the details (there was no stork
mentioned and I didn't a very good glimpse of him with all the other
folks hovering over him and coochy-cooing), but the point is that
Paul's a new father. Wish him well via paul(a)zope.com !
Zope Corporation has established a mailing list to specifically
discuss issues which arise when integrating Zope and various
relational datbases -- zope-db(a)zope.org. Any posting from "how do
I?" to "but..." and the ever-favorite "help with ...!" is fair
game. If you have an interest in subscribing, please visit
http://lists.zope.org/ today, and sign up to the Zope-DB list.
EuroZope Goings-On
There were no updates on the EuroZope site at
http://www.eurozope.org since the last News issue.
Zope Sightings
I had fun attending the Washington DC Zope Python Users' Group (the
DC ZPUG) meeting. There are incriminating pictures.
http://www.chrisabraham.com/article.php?sid=109&mode=flat&order=0 .
I shepherded a Q&A session without any real topic, after which
Andreas Jung (also an employee of Zope Corporation, but desperately
pretending not to be) gave a talk about Python as middleware.
Michael Roberts of Vivitek writes a piece for IBM developerWorks
about how to extend Zope and Python in C.
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pyzo.html . He
appears to have really gotten traction since his last developerWorks
article about Zope in April titled "Zope for the Perl/CGI
programmer" (
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-zope.html ).
I missed this in last week's issue. Dennis Tenney from Linux Weekly
News interviews Guido van Rossum and Jim Fulton. See
http://lwn.net/2001/features/oreilly2001/GuidoJimInterview.php3 .
Inside, Guido talks about how he likes Zope Corporation, and Jim
talks about the component architecture and PHDs.
Jon Udell mentions Zope in his byte article on paying forweb
services.
http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1113/byt20010822s0003/0827_udell.html
Tim Peters explains how Zope Corporation calculates his pay rate.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&selm=mailman.998686118.5319.…
Spoke Technologies' CrankSet is a commercial website-building tool
based on Zope. http://www.spoke.net .
Maik Roeder's Uzopia has an (older but fascinating) tidbit about how
to use the underscore in Python to retrieve the last evaluated
expression, as well as some other interesting stuff. You learn
something new every day! http://uzopia.editthispage.com/ (scroll
down about midway for the underscore hack explanation)
Zope.org Meta Matter
Due to Zope.org bandwidth and storage abuse by "warez" and MP3
distributors, we were forced to close a few accounts and remove an
estimated 2 GB of files, and place some restrictions on File upload
sizes. This means that Members can no longer upload files over 500
KB in size. Sorry! Blame society.
Webalizer traffic statistics output for the systems that make up
www.zope.org is available at http://ns1.zope.org:82/ .
The Zope.org site itself has weathered some minor but obvious tweaks
lately, mostly having to do with graphics replacements in the header
and sidebars. Many thanks to Penney Simpson!
Zope.org Almanac
The Zope.org Almanac lists select new or updated content spotted on
Zope.org since the last release of the Zope News.
Selected News Items
New York Zope Users Group
http://www.zope.org/Members/vito/zope_meeting_08_29
New Or Updated How-Tos
Compiling ZMySQLDA for Zope 2.4 on win32 with MSVC
http://www.zope.org/Members/isalsberg/MySQLDA/Compiling_ZMySQLDA_%20win32
Building ZPatterns C extension
http://www.zope.org/Members/Julian%20Munoz/InstallZPatterns
Viewing folders and objects in VRML (3D)
http://www.zope.org/Members/knudriis/vrml
Selected New Or Updated Software Products
Cache documents via mod_perl module for Apache
http://www.zope.org/Members/xgwsbae/ZopeProxyCacheManager
SiteAccess with enhanced VirtualHostMonster
http://www.zope.org/Members/sfm/SiteAccessEnhanced
Strip-o-Gram HTML Conversion Library
http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/StripOGram
Debugging aid for Zope users
http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/ZDebug
Image Tag "Monkey Patch"
http://www.zope.org/Members/bowerymarc/ImageTag_Hotfix
Patch to make work Z SQL Methods with Transparent Folders
http://www.zope.org/Members/fquin/SQL.py.patch
BesserWisser (multilingual knowledge base)
http://www.zope.org/Members/EIONET/BesserWisser
ZEO ClientStorage
http://www.zope.org/Members/natsukashi/Products/MountedStorage
Render StructuredText to HTML with images
http://www.zope.org/Members/Barabbas/stx_to_html
Squishdot
http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/Squishdot
Photo and Photo Folder
http://www.zope.org/Members/rbickers/Photo
Photo
http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo
Informix Database Adaptor
http://www.zope.org/Members/mark_rees/ZInformixDA
Znolk SQL Wizard: A Wizard that creates forms for manipulating SQL data
http://www.zope.org/Members/zwork/Znolk_SQL_Wizard
Site Tracker Product
http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/SiteTrackerProduct
Zope(a)Zope.org Mail List Summary for August 18 - 31
People can't get enough of drinking from the firehose that is the
Zope(a)Zope.org mail list! There've been roughly a bazillion messages
posted since August 17, 2001 (the day of the last Zope News).
Interesting messages and threads include those below.
Giorgos V. reports curious TCP slowdowns with Zope on FreeBSD
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097880.html
Carl Blesius tries to make life easier with INSTANCE_HOME, Dario helps
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097914.html
Folks help Robb Allen get the Zope Tutorial going
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098049.html
A discussion about dynamically generating text graphics in Zope
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098089.html
Marc Fischer kicks off a discussion about autostarting Zope
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098149.html
Bill Anderson makes a request about the naming of "hotfixes"
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098311.html
Brian Lloyd rules from the bench about the hotfix issue.
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098439.html
The image "not-hotfix", ImageMagick, and PIL
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098367.html
Kyler Laird kicks off a discussion about web-trojan-horse security
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098436.html
ViNiL wants input on a Czech Zope portal
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098594.html
Zope's hasRole API call syntax and history is discussed
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098684.html
Michael Montagne wants to use vim to edit Zope code and finds out how
http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098710.html
End Matter
The opinions expressed in Zope News are solely the authors', and not
the opinions of Zope Corporation, The Zope Community at-large, or
the Spanish Inquisition.
If you or your company are doing something interesting with Zope,
please submit a blurb to Zope Weekly News for possible inclusion by
emailing Chris McDonough (mailto:chrism@zope.com ).
For prior editions of the Zope News, see
http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/
What Is Zope?
Zope is an open source web application server that can be used for
managing website content, building intranets, and creating portals.
For more information, see http://www.zope.org
Zope is built using the Python programming language. For Python
information, see http://www.python.org
--
Chris McDonough Zope Corporation
http://www.zope.orghttp://www.zope.com
"Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones"
Hi all!
Coincidentally, with the discussions on the image monkey patch and Photo
products, I have released the first public version of the Photo and Photo
Folder product.
Although many ideas were taken from Andrew Lahser's Photo product (which is
no longer maintained), this product is a complete rewrite designed to take
its place.
To see it in action, you can visit my not-at-all-fancy personal Web site,
http://www.bickersfamily.org/Photos.
For more details and to download, visit the Photo Product page:
http://www.zope.org/Members/rbickers/Photo
Enjoy!
_______________________
Ron Bickers
Logic Etc, Inc.
At long last, the fourth and final beta release of ZEO 1.0 is
available at http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO. I expect to release
1.0 final next week.
Zope Enterprise Objects (ZEO) provides the ability for multiple
processes to use a single Zope Object Database. ZEO turns the Zope
object system into a distributed architecture, allowing multiple
processors, machines, and networks to act as one website.
The 1.0b4 release fixes all the major bugs reported since 1.0b3. The
list of bug fixes is:
- Improved robustness of ZEO under load. Many non-fatal socket
errors are caught and handled now. Also fix NameError bug that
could cause ZEO to fail on Windows.
- Reduced the likelihood that a thread.error exception ("release
unlocked lock") will be raised if a client disconnects from a
storage unexpectedly.
- Fixed a bug in undo handling that caused connections to be reset
and prevented undos from propagating to all clients.
- Fixed a bug that prevented a client from reconnecting to a
server if the server restarted.
- Fixed start.py so that it prints a message on the console when
it fails in addition to using zLOG.
- Fleshed out installation instructions and version dependencies.
- Fixed bug in non-transactional undo that caused undo to fail and
clients to restart.
Jeremy
Squishdot 1.3.0 is now available from:
http://www.squishdot.org/Download.
The following major changes were made:
- Squishdot is now compatiable with Zope 2.4.0 and above but still works
with Zope 2.3.x.
- Many, many bugs were fixed and a lot of refactoring was done.
- A fairly complete PyUnit test suite has been written.
See http://squishdot.org/Documentation/Changes
for full details.
**This release requires Zope 2.3.2 or later!**
If you run into problems, remember Squishdot has a mailing list at YahooGroups
and a bug collector on SourceForge.
cheers,
Chris
This plugin module will mail important log messages from the Zope logging system
to an address you specify.
This release fixes a Python 1.5 incompatability.
For more details, see http://www.zope.org/Members/NIP/MailingLogger.
cheers,
Chris
ImageTag_Hotfix
This hotfix makes it so that all Image (and derived) object use PIL to
resize when you use the tag method with integer (non-%) height and/or width
parameters.
This way, stuff like the PhotoAlbum will behave (not give you a page full of
full-image thumbnails).
This version should be cache aware, it's recommended for big sites to
associate these with a RAMcache to cut down on PIL usage- thought it's
pretty fast.
It also steals the RESPONSE.set_header code from Image so the thumbs are
cached on the clients.
Since it's a hotfix it's easy to try it and see if it's working for you, and
remove it if not. It does not modify any of your images - it generates the
thumbs on the fly and only stores them in a RAMcache if you have one set up.
Check the README.txt for sage advice on getting PIL to work :)
here: http://www.zope.org/Members/bowerymarc/ImageTag_Hotfix
This product is designed to make a site-wide content search catalog much
easier to maintain. This product is a hotfix which extends DTML
Documents to give them catalog-awareness and additional methods for use
in ZCatalog indexes and metadata.
This is "set and forget" software that takes care of things
transparently once it is set up. In other words, no additional ongoing
work or thought is required to keep your pages indexed and updated in
your site search catalog.
The new release contains the following enhancements:
* More efficient catalog indexing
* Greatly improved success rendering and indexing dynamic documents
* The ability to specify a summary for a documents manually, if desired
Download at: http://www.zope.org/Members/Kaivo/DTMLDocumentExt
Enjoy.
--
| Casey Duncan
| Kaivo, Inc.
| cduncan(a)kaivo.com
`------------------>
This plugin module will mail important log messages from the Zope logging system
to an address you specify.
For more details see http://www.zope.org/Members/NIP/MailingLogger
cheers,
Chris
PS: We've found this very useful, hope other people do to :-)
PPS: Any problems, let us know...