September 2003 - Zope-Announce

[ANN] PloneCollectorNG 0.10 available
by Andreas Jung 29 Sep '03

29 Sep '03

I am pleased to announce the release of PloneCollectorNG 0.10 (PCNG) PCNG is a bugtracking system for Plone. It is based on the concepts and ideas of CMFCollector and CMFCollectorNG but it is a complete re-write. This release implements more or less the same functionality as the latest release of CMFCollectorNG except email notifications, confidential workflow. One major highlight of this new version is the built-in TTW editor for Archetypes schemas. This means you can edit the complete fields for your issue (field types and widgets) through-the-web including the use of schemats etc. Another goal of the new implementation was to focus on security. So I dropped the old workflow and created a new one (which is much simpler). The codebase is very small and generic and therefore very much extensible for the future. My vision for PloneCollectorNG is: - create an enterprise bugtracking system - support multiple workflows - extend its functionality for issue tracking e.g. in call-centers etc. - add highlevel and high-quality reporting Wiki and Download: http://www.zope.org/Members/ajung/PloneCollectorNG Cheers, -aj

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ZServerSSL latest
by Ng Pheng Siong 28 Sep '03

28 Sep '03

Hi, M2Crypto 0.12 snapshot 1 is now available. What's new: - Tested with Python 2.3. - ZServerSSL with client certificate authentication. - ZServerSSL for Zope 2.7.0b2. Get M2Crypto here: http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps/m2/ As usual, feedback is welcome. Cheers. -- Ng Pheng Siong <ngps(a)netmemetic.com> http://firewall.rulemaker.net -+- Manage Your Firewall Rulebase Changes http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- Open Source Python Crypto & SSL -- Ng Pheng Siong <ngps(a)netmemetic.com> http://firewall.rulemaker.net -+- Manage Your Firewall Rulebase Changes http://sandbox.rulemaker.net/ngps -+- Open Source Python Crypto & SSL

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[Warning] "No more ReadConflicts" patch can cause inconsistencies
by Dieter Maurer 27 Sep '03

27 Sep '03

Dear Zope community, I have to admit that my "No more ReadConflicts" patch can cause ZODB inconsistencies. Probability is low but not zero. Details can be found on <mailto:zodb-dev@zope.org>. This fault was revealed by one of the ZODB 3.1.2 InvalidationTests which can fail on high speed servers. The problem can not be fixed for ZODB 3.1. I will work on a patch for ZODB 3.2 which avoids this problem (by implementing part of Jeremy's MVCC proposal). Dieter

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PyCon Announcement: Mitch Kapor is opening keynote speaker
by PyCon Chair 26 Sep '03

26 Sep '03

[Apologies to people who see this twice; there was a glitch in the original sending.] Mitch Kapor to Keynote PyCon DC 2004 ------------------------------------ Washington, DC, September 24, 2003 The Python Software Foundation announced today that Mitch Kapor will be the opening keynote speaker for their second US Python community conference next March. Mr. Kapor is well known as a co-founder of Lotus Development Corporation and as a co-founder and the first chairman of the San Francisco-based Electronic Freedom Foundation, and has been an active entrepreneur in information technology for many years. More recently he founded the Open Software Applications Foundation (OSAF - see http://www.osafoundation.org/) The OSAF is using Python to build Chandler, an open source Personal Information Manager. PyCon is a community-oriented conference for developers of Python applications and for those with an interest in the development of the Python programming language. It offers the opportunity to learn about significant advances in Python's uses and development community, to participate in a programming sprint with some of the leading minds in the Open Source community, and to meet fellow developers from around the world. The organizers work to make the conference affordable and accessible to all. Pycon DC 2004 will be held March 24-26, 2004 in Washington, D.C. There will be a four-day development sprint before the conference. Volunteers interested in helping to run PyCon should subscribe to the organizers mailing list at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-organizers Don't miss any PyCon announcements! Subscribe at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-announce You can discuss PyCon with other interested people by subscribing at http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/pycon-interest The central resource for PyCon DC 2004 is http://www.python.org/pycon/dc2004/ -- Aahz (aahz(a)pythoncraft.com) <*> http://www.pythoncraft.com/ "It is easier to optimize correct code than to correct optimized code." --Bill Harlan

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zetadb-0.8.1 released
by Santi Camps 25 Sep '03

25 Sep '03

zetadb is a zope product that allows a rapid application development (RAD) of relational database oriented web applications. It automatically generates transladable and user friendly zope objects to maintain data over the web. It also allow generation of data-filled OpenOffice documents. Using zetadb you will be able to develop professional intranet / extranet business applications 4 or 5 times faster than using other more generalistic tools / languages More information and download: http://zetadb.sourceforge.net Santi Camps

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ZODB 3.2b3 released
by Jeremy Hylton 24 Sep '03

24 Sep '03

We released ZODB 3.2b2 on Tuesday evening. You can find it at the usual place: http://www.zope.org/Products/ZODB3.2 This release contains the last new work we plan to do before the ZODB 3.2 final release. We have fixed several bugs, including a deadlock problem that had been reported against 3.2b2. ZODB 3.2 has a number of new features and improvements over ZODB 3.1: - improve performance and stability of ZEO - new ZEO authentication protocol - new configuration language, ZConfig, for databases, storages, and ZEO servers - many bug fixes Please give this new release a try. We hope to have a final release soon, and bugs reported soon are more likely to get fixed before the final release. I've included the NEWS.txt summary of the most recent changes. Jeremy What's new in ZODB3 3.2 beta 3 ============================== Release date: 23-Sep-2003 Note: The changes listed for this release include changes also made in ZODB 3.1.x releases and ported to the 3.2 release. This version of ZODB 3.2 is not compatible with Python 2.1. Early versions were explicitly designed to be compatible with Zope 2.6. That plan has been dropped, because Zope 2.7 is already in beta release. Several of the classes in ZEO and ZODB now inherit from object, making them new-style classes. The primary motivation for the change was to make it easier to debug memory leaks. We don't expect any behavior to change as a result. A new feature to allow removal of connection pools for versions was ported from Zope 2.6. This feature is needed by Zope to avoid denial of service attacks that allow a client to create an arbitrary number of version pools. Fixed several critical ZEO bugs. - If several client transactions were blocked waiting for the storage and one of the blocked clients disconnected, the server would attempt to restart one of the other waiting clients. Since the disconnected client did not have the storage lock, this could lead to deadlock. It could also cause the assertion "self._client is None" to fail. - If a storage server fails or times out between the vote and the finish, the ZEO cache could get populated with objects that didn't make it to the storage server. - If a client loses its connection to the server near the end of a transaction, it is now guaranteed to get a ClientDisconnected error even if it reconnects before the transaction finishes. This is necessary because the server will always abort the transaction. In some cases, the client would never see an error for the aborted transaction. - In tpc_finish(), reordered the calls so that the server's tpc_finish() is called (and must succeed) before we update the ZEO client cache. - The storage name is now prepended to the sort key, to ensure a unique global sort order if storages are named uniquely. This can prevent deadlock in some unusual cases. Fixed several serious flaws in the implementation of the ZEO authentication protocol. - The smac layer would accept a message without a MAC even after the session key was established. - The client never initialized its session key, so it never checked incoming messages or created MACs for outgoing messags. - The smac layer used a single HMAC instance for sending and receiving messages. This approach could only work if client and server were guaranteed to process all messages in the same total order, which could only happen in simple scenarios like unit tests. Fixed a bug in ExtensionClass when comparing ExtensionClass instances. The code could raise RuntimeWarning under Python 2.3, and produce incorrect results on 64-bit platforms. Fixed bug in BDBStorage that cause lead to DBRunRecoveryErrors when a transaction was aborted after performing operations like commit version or undo that create new references to existing pickles. Fixed a bug in Connection.py that caused it to fail with an AttributeError if close() was called after the database was closed. The test suite leaves fewer log files behind, although it still leaves a lot of junk. The test.py script puts each tests temp files in a separate directory, so it is easier to see which tests are causing problems. Unfortunately, it is still to tedious to figure out why the identified tests are leaving files behind. This release contains the latest and greatest version of the BDBStorage. This storage has still not seen testing in a production environment, but it represents the current best design and most recent code culled from various branches where development has occurred. The Tools directory contains a number of small improvements, a few new tools, and README.txt that catalogs the tools. Many of the tools are installed by setup.py; those scripts will now have a #! line set automatically on Unix. Fixed bugs in Tools/repozo.py, including a timing-dependent one that could cause the following invocation of repozo to do a full backup when an incremental backup would have sufficed. A pair of new scripts from Jim Fulton can be used to synthesize workloads and measure ZEO performance: see zodbload.py and zeoserverlog.py in the Tools directory. Note that these require Zope. Tools/checkbtrees.py was strengthened in two ways: - In addition to running the _check() method on each BTree B found, BTrees.check.check(B) is also run. The check() function was written after checkbtrees.py, and identifies kinds of damage B._check() cannot find. - Cycles in the object graph no longer lead to unbounded output. Note that preventing this requires remembering the oid of each persistent object found, which increases the memory needed by the script.

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[Ann] Post-Authentication-Hook patch
by Dieter Maurer 23 Sep '03

23 Sep '03

In some case, you want to take special actions once the user has been determined at the end of traversal. You may, e.g., want to deny Manager role to any non HTTPS request. This patch adds support for a *post authentication hook*. It adds code to the 'validated_hook', called when the user is successfully authenticated. The code tries to acquire an object 'post_authentication_hook' from 'request.PARENTS[0]'. If this is successful, it calls this object with the arguments 'request' and 'user'. Usually, this call will raise Unauthorized when it has objections against the request. Download: <http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/postauth.pat> Dieter

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Zogger 0.9 Released
by Terry Hancock 22 Sep '03

22 Sep '03

[Edited to include download site -- Terry] Zogger is a "Zope Ogg Player" Actually it seems to play mp3s too. This is really the work of jlguiapplet, an applet from "JavaZOOM", which is basically a WinAMP/XMMS clone that runs as an applet. Zogger deploys the player and acts as a song folder in Zope, holding "Audio Track" objects which are expected to be ogg or mp3 files. A subfolder, "skins" contains .wsz (winamp-compatible) files which control the appearance of the applet. The default skin in Zogger is AcquaXMMS, by DOlson, which happens to look fairly good with the default Zope/ZMI color scheme, but the skin can be changed simply by uploading a desired skin and setting the "skin" property of Zogger. Embedding the applet is as trivial as using a Zope image, and uses the same basic mechanism, so you can use a line like: <dtml-var songs> where "songs" is a Zogger instance. Zogger is licensed under the GPL and includes the jlguiapplet (LGPL) and default skin (GPL). It is a pure-python Zope Product, and has no special dependencies. The jlguiapplet is for "Java 2", so the user will need to install the Java plugin for their browser (this appears to happen automatically with Internet Explorer, BTW). Get Zogger 0.9 at: http://www.anansispaceworks.com/papers_html This is "version 0" code, because there are a number of basic features missing: -- Audio Track files are *assumed* to be audio data. No checking of the file format is done. The results of loading something else are not defined. -- No meta data is extracted from the Audio Track files, so the automatically generated song titles are simply the Zope title, and the track length is not correct. These limitations are largely because I don't currently have pyogg/pyvorbis installed on my Zope server, but it shouldn't really be hard to add these features -- I think Audio Track *should* try to load the meta data from the Ogg file as Zope properties (or at least attributes), but it doesn't do this yet. However, it does seem to work reasonably well, and I have deployed Zogger on my personal site at: http://www.anansispaceworks.net/Narya_Net/Home/Terry Which is why I wrote it, in fact. ;-) Cheers, Terry -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com

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[Ann] ManagableIndex: combine value, control acquisition, check types
by Dieter Maurer 21 Sep '03

21 Sep '03

ManagableIndex can mean different things for different people. For a content manager, it brings flexible field and keyword indexes managable via the ZMI to * combine values from different sources, ignoring irrelevant values and transforming values in an inadequate form, Example: index an object via title if it is non-empty but use id otherwise Example: add portal_type to the Subject index transforming it into a sequence (as required by a keyword index). * control acquisition and prevent acquired values to be indexed * ignore stop-terms, normalize terms and check types Example: when you do not want that an object is indexed under a meaningless default value, you can define this value as a stop-term Example: the BTrees underlying Zope indexes require its keys to have a persistently consistent ordering. When this is not the case, they become corrupt. While modern Python versions (at least Python 2.3) compare values from different elementary types persistently consistent, the result can be quite unintuitive. Therefore, it is best when all terms in an index belong to the same types. Normalizing and type checking helps to ensure this. For a developer, ManagableIndex provides a framework for index definition, improving on PluginIndexes. It provides for managability, automatically and intelligently handles unindexing when an object is reindexed and implements and, or and range queries (for not too complex indexes). ManagableIndex requires OFolder. You can download OFolder from <http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope> More information: <http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/ManagableIndex.html> Download: <http://www.dieter.handshake.de/pyprojects/zope/ManagableIndex.tgz> Dieter

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MailBoxer 2.3.0 released
by Maik Jablonski 16 Sep '03

16 Sep '03

Hi to all, I'm happy to announce a new major release of MailBoxer - the mailinglist / newsletter / mailarchive - framework for Zope. Where can I download MailBoxer? http://www.zope.org/Members/mjablonski/MailBoxer Please note: Zope.org is a little bit buggy and the prior release (2.2.6) stands above 2.3.0. Don't know why... What's new? * added very nice MailBoxer-Logo provided by Karsten W. Rohrbach. Thank you so much, Karsten!!! The logo is just as I imagined MailBoxer in my dreams. GREAT WORK! Please note: The MailBoxer-Logo is distributed under the Create Commons License (see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/) * added batchsize: Now you can determine how many recipients are bulked in one mail to the smtp-server. This is useful if your mail-server can't send huge lists at once or remote servers don't accept really big recipient-lists. Default is bulking in one batch as in previous releases (batchsize = 0). Many thanks to Patrick G?nther for testing a pre-release with a really huge list!!! * made all properties deleteable, so they can be acquired from a parent-container if you delete them. * refactored code from index_html into mail_index. This allows you using PageTemplates for displaying the archive much more easily (see README.txt). Enjoy MailBoxing... Maik.

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