January 2003 - Zope-Announce

ANNOUNCE: Pound - reverse proxy and load balancer - v1.2
by Robert Segall 20 Jan '03

20 Jan '03

This is to announce the release of Pound v1.2. This is mostly a bug fix release. Most prominent problems fixed: - for some reason a few characters went missing in the definition of request strings. This was usually observed in form submission - when Pound would reply with a "Request not allowed". - problems in handling "100 Continue" server responses. The software is at version 1.2 (production quality). Further testing (especially under heavy loads), improvements and suggestions are welcome. What is Pound (from the Web page) - a reverse-proxy: it passes requests from client browsers to one or more back-end servers. - a load balancer: it will distribute the requests from the client browsers among several back-end servers, while keeping session information. - an SSL wrapper: Pound will decrypt HTTPS requests from client browsers and pass them as plain HTTP to the back-end browsers. - an HTTP/HTTPS sanitizer: Pound will verify requests for correctness and accept only well-formed ones. - an HTTP/1.1 to 1.0 proxy. - a fail-over-server: should a back-end server fail, Pound will take note of the fact and stop passing requests to it until it recovers. - a request redirector - it will pass client requests to separate groups of servers, based on required URL and the presence or absence of headers (pattern matching) Pound was specifically developed to serve as a front-end for multiple instances of Zope running on top of a common ZEO storage, but can be used with any other web server. A patch for the Python source of z2.py is available as part of the distribution to allow using Pound's SSL capabilities. Pound is currently in use in several medium to large volume sites and seems to be holding up quite well: largest reported site does about 3.5 million requests per day, peaking at over 300 requests per second. The speed is well superior to other, equivalent solutions, the configuration is much simpler and the necessary resources (CPU, RAM, disk) are much, much lower. Pound is distributed under the GPL. For further information, download, etc. please see http://www.apsis.ch/pound Enjoy and let me know how it works for you. -- Robert Segall Apsis GmbH Postfach, Uetikon am See, CH-8707 Tel: +41-1-920 4904

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[ANN] CMFCollectorNG 0.20 beta1 released
by Andreas Jung 18 Jan '03

18 Jan '03

I am pleased to announce the release of CMFCollectorNG 0.20 beta1 CMFCollectorNG is a Zope/CMF-based bugtracking system (based on CMFCollector). Major features of CMFCollectorNG: * major code cleanup and complete new skins * very generic to add new ticket properties to a tracker * enhanced tracker configuration through the web * extend usage of the CMF memberdata tool to store user informations and user preferences * rewritten transcript to keep issue related informations in an abstract format to produce different output (HTML, plain text for email notifications) * tickets can have references to other tickets (also across CMFCollectorNG instances) * dedicated views for uploaded files and references to other tickets * better roles management: o TrackerAdmins manage the tracker o Supporters can file tickets, create followups, upload files, add references to other tickets o Reporters can file new tickets and upload files and references * XML export (to be used with XMLRPC) * watchlist/monitoring functionality * Plone compatibility * much more minor improvements (too much to mention them :-) ) Changes since 0.20alpha1: * completed English UI * better CMF and Plone compatiblity * lots of minor fixes Project page: http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/CMFCollectorNG/Wiki/FrontPage Downloads: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=68417 --------------------------------------------------------------------- - Andreas Jung http://www.andreas-jung.com - - EMail: andreas at andreas-jung.com - - "Life is too short to (re)write parsers" - ---------------------------------------------------------------------

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ZODB 3.2 alpha 1 released
by Jeremy Hylton 17 Jan '03

17 Jan '03

I'm pleased to announce the release of ZODB 3.2 alpha 1. This release includes many new features, some of them still a little experimental. You'll find a faster ZEO server with a simpler command-line script to run it. There's also a new configuration package, called ZConfig, which will eventually be included in Zope, too. In keeping with 3.x releases, some obscure BTrees bugs have been fixed. I expect there will be another alpha release as we refine the experimental features and finish other proposed new features. See the release plan in the ZODB Wiki at http://www.zope.org/Wikis/ZODB. You can download a source release and Windows installers from http://www.zope.org/Products/StandaloneZODB I've included the most recent entries from NEWS.txt below. Jeremy What's new in ZODB3 3.2 alpha 1 =============================== Release date: 17-Jan-2003 Most of the changes in this release are performance and stability improvements to ZEO. A major packaging change is that there won't be a separate ZEO release. The new ZConfig is a noteworthy addtion (see below). ZODB ---- An experimental new transaction API was added. The Connection class has a new method, setLocalTransaction(). ZODB applications can call this method to bind transactions to connections rather than threads. This is especially useful for GUI applications, which often have only one thread but multiple independent activities within that thread (generally one per window). Thanks to Christian Reis for championing this feature. Applications that take advantage of this feature should not use the get_transaction() function. Until now, ZODB itself sometimes assumed get_transaction() was the only way to get the transaction. Minor corrections have been added. The ZODB test suite, on the other hand, can continue to use get_transaction(), since it is free to assume that transactions are bound to threads. ZEO --- There is a new recommended script for starting a storage server. We recommend using ZEO/runzeo.py instead of ZEO/start.py. The start.py script is still available in this release, but it will no longer be maintained and will eventually be removed. There is a new zdaemon implementation. This version is a separate script that runs an arbitrary daemon. To run the ZEO server as a daemon, you would run "zdaemon.py runzeo.py". There is also a simple shell, zdctl.py, that can be used to manage a daemon. Try "zdctl.py -p runzeo.py". There is a new version of the ZEO protocol in this release and a first stab at protocol negotiation. (It's a first stab because the protocol checking supporting in ZODB 3.1 was too primitive to support anything better.) A ZODB 3.2 ZEO client can talk to an old server, but a ZODB 3.2 server can't talk to an old client. It's safe to upgrade all the clients first and upgrade the server last. The ZEO client cache format changed, so you'll need to delete persistent caches before restarting clients. The ZEO cache verification protocol was revised to require many fewer messages in cases where a client or server restarts quickly. The performance of full cache verification has improved dramatically. XXX Get measurements from Jim -- somewhere in 2x-5x recall. The implementation was fixed to use the very-fast getSerial() method on the storage instead of the comparatively slow load(). The ZEO server has an optional timeout feature that will abort a connection that does not commit within a certain amount of time. The timeout works by closing the socket the client is using, causing both client and server to abort the transaction and continue. This is a drastic step, but can be useful to prevent a hung client or other bug from blocking a server indefinitely. A bug was fixed in the ZEO protocol that allowed clients to read stale cache data while cache verification was being performed. The fixed version prevents the client from using the storage until after verification completes. The ZEO server has an experimental monitoring interface that reports usage statistics for the storage server including number of connected clients and number of transactions active and committed. It can be enabled by passing the -m flag to runsvr.py. The ZEO ClientStorage no longer supports the environment variables CLIENT_HOME, INSTANCE_HOME, or ZEO_CLIENT. The ZEO1 package is still included with this release, but there is no longer an option to install it. BTrees ------ The BTrees package now has a check module that inspects a BTree to check internal invariants. Bugs in older versions of the code code leave a BTree in an inconsistent state. Calling BTrees.check.check() on a BTree object should verify its consistency. (See the NEWS section for 3.1 beta 1 below to for the old BTrees bugs.) Fixed a rare conflict resolution problem in the BTrees that could cause an segfault when the conflict resolution resulted in any empty bucket. Installation ------------ The distutils setup now installs several Python scripts. The runzeo.py and zdaemon.py scripts mentioned above and several fsXXX.py scripts from the Tools directory. The test.py script does not run all the ZEO tests by default, because the ZEO tests take a long time to run. Use --all to run all the tests. Otherwise a subset of the tests, mostly using MappingStorage, are run. Storages -------- There are two new storages based on Sleepycat's BerkeleyDB in the BDBStorage package. Barry will have to write more here, because I don't know how different they are from the old bsddb3Storage storages. See Doc/BDBStorage.txt for more information. It now takes less time to open an existing FileStorage. The FileStorage uses a BTree-based index that is faster to pickle and unpickle. It also saves the index periodically so that subsequent opens will go fast even if the storage was not closed cleanly. Misc ---- The new ZConfig package, which will be used by Zope and ZODB, is included. ZConfig provides a configuration syntax, similar to Apache's syntax. The package can be used to configure the ZEO server and ZODB databases. See the module ZODB.config for functions to open the database from configuration. See ZConfig/doc for more info. The zLOG package now uses the logging package by Vinay Sajip, which will be included in Python 2.3. The Sync extension was removed from ExtensionClass, because it was not used by ZODB.

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ASP404 IIS+Zope connector, 1.0-beta2 release
by Leonardo Rochael Almeida 16 Jan '03

16 Jan '03

Features new in this release: * Fix for a bug that caused hangs and timeouts on IE * New COM object that already comes with Win2k and XP. You no longer need to download WinHTTP 5.0 from MSDN. * New configuration variables for when IIS itself is behind a load balancer. Check it out at: http://www.zope.org/Members/hiperlogica/ASP404 Cheers, Leo

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Nuxeo Collaborative Portal Server 2.2 beta1 released
by Stefane Fermigier 16 Jan '03

16 Jan '03

Hi, We have just released the first beta version of Nuxeo Collaborative Portal Server 2.2. New in this release: - new FlexibleDocument product (web-based composite documents editor) - new WorkflowSchema product (web-based workflow schemas editor, tailored for administrative workflows) - new NuxRSS product (syndication using RSS) - bug fixes and other enhancements Some of these enhancements come from the SIT du Bas-Rhin (http://www.bas-rhin.sit.gouv.fr/) and CIRB GroupZope projects, as well as other internal and customer projets at Nuxeo. Nuxeo CPS is free / open source software. The main functioning characteristics of Nuxeo Collaborative Portal Server ar still: - Collaborative publication of documents - Indexing and previewing of office automation documents (MS Office, StarOffice, OpenOffice.org, PDF, RTF, XML, etc. ). - Integrated search engine - Versioning - Mailing lists - Workflow - Integrated Meta Directory - Security (based on roles) More information: - Download / more information: http://www.nuxeo.org/cps/ - Nuxeo CPS white paper: http://www.nuxeo.com/wp/cps_wp.pdf - Public CVS: http://cvs.nuxeo.org/ -- Stéfane Fermigier, Tel: +33 (0)6 63 04 12 77 (mobile). Nuxeo Collaborative Portal Server: http://www.nuxeo.com/cps Gestion de contenu web / portail collaboratif / groupware / open source !

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Re: UnifiedHtmlDocument 1.0 released
by Lars Heber 15 Jan '03

15 Jan '03

Due to multiple demand, here's the URL on Zope.org: http://www.zope.org/Members/lheber/software/ Sorry, I obviously did s. th. wrong when I requested to catalog my software section :-( Hope, now it works... Have fun! -- Lars Heber T-Systems GEI GmbH Hausanschrift: Clausstrasse 3, 09126 Chemnitz Postanschrift: Clausstrasse 3, 09126 Chemnitz Telefon : (+49 371) 5359-271 Fax : (+49 371) 5359-133 E-Mail : Lars.Heber(a)t-systems.com Internet: http://www.t-systems.de

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AdaptableStorage Update
by Shane Hathaway 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

A corrected release of AdaptableStorage has been posted. Friday's release had an accidental dependency on unreleased Zope code (the "cannot import name z64" error) and was missing an entire subpackage, gateway_sql. Version 0.4.1 corrects these issues. It also adds a README.txt with a short step-by-step guide for mounting a filesystem directory into Zope. Download it here: http://hathaway.freezope.org/Software/AdaptableStorage For the CVS savvy, you can also get it from cvs.zope.org at Products/AdaptableStorage. Shane

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UnifiedHtmlDocument 1.0 released
by Lars Heber 13 Jan '03

13 Jan '03

Hello to everyone, I'm pleased to announce the first release of UnifiedHtmlDocument 1.0. This product implements a special HTML Document which uses standard_html_header and standard_html_footer in an intelligent way so that features of both (the HTML document and the header / footer), such as CSS, JavaScript etc. are used. The type of intelligent merging distinguishes this product from the existing HTMLDocument products which are available at www.zope.org. Those just join standard_html_header, the body of the HTML document, and standard_html_footer, whilst a Unified HTML document takes all available data from each of the three objects. Hope to hear your comments. -- Lars Heber T-Systems GEI GmbH Hausanschrift: Clausstrasse 3, 09126 Chemnitz Postanschrift: Clausstrasse 3, 09126 Chemnitz Telefon : (+49 371) 5359-271 Fax : (+49 371) 5359-133 E-Mail : Lars.Heber(a)t-systems.com Internet: http://www.t-systems.de

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Zope-News Project Needs You!
by george donnelly 12 Jan '03

12 Jan '03

I'm pleased to announce the opening of the Zope-News project, an open community effort to get Zope news and information into the public eye on a regular basis (and get fame and glory for Zopers who write about Zope! ;) ) To participate and stay informed, subscribe to the zope-news list now: http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-news We need your help with the following: Write short articles for Zope (Weekly) News, e.g.: -New Product Releases -New Howto Releases -General Community News -Interviews with Developers, Solution Providers, Community Members ... -Interesting Threads on Discussion lists (summaries/commentaries) -Anything else that has to do with Zope! The short-term goal is get out the Zope News every two weeks starting January 20th (and then 2/3, 2/17, 3/3, 3/17, etc). Here's the current workflow: send your writeup to zope-news(a)zope.org. Subscribe to the list here: http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-news The long term goal is to get Zope more into the public eye and get more Zopers writing about Zope. I've set up a wiki page under the NZO project for brainstorming and comments: http://www.zope.org/projects/nzo/ZopeNewsProject Looking forward to working with you to make Zope News the vibrant voice of the Zope Community! <--> george donnelly - http://zettai.net/ - "We Love Newbies" :) Zope Hosting - Dynamic Website Design - Search Engine Promotion Yahoo, AIM: zettainet - ICQ: 51907738 - e:george@zettai.net

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DirectoryStorage 1.0.0
by Toby Dickenson 12 Jan '03

12 Jan '03

Announcing the release of DirectoryStorage version 1.0.0. DirectoryStorage is a ZODB storage which uses many files; one file per object revision. It is designed to be scaleable, manageable, and fault-tolerant. The only changes since beta 2 are to the documentation. Specifically, thanks to Andre Schubert for noting the requirement for Zope 2.6.x Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=53818&release_id=1332… More information: http://dirstorage.sourceforge.net -- Toby Dickenson http://www.geminidataloggers.com/people/tdickenson

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