November 2004 - Zope-Announce

Zope 3 Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 1
by Gary Poster 09 Nov '04

09 Nov '04

Zope 3 Newsletter: Volume 2 Issue 1 This newsletter describes some of the many exciting projects using Zope 3 and also has reports from the Zope Corporation CTO and Zope BDFL Jim Fulton and from the principal architect of the CMF, Tres Seaver. Some news didn't make it to me for inclusion in the newsletter. Please send me your news when you can! Send to gary(a)modernsongs.com Table of Contents: - Zope X3Final Released - (Jim Fulton) Zope X3.1 Plans - (Martijn Faassen) Five - (Martijn Faassen) Zope 3 Base - (Andy Adiwidjaja, Janko Hauser) union.cms: Real-World Usage of Five - (Philipp von Weitershausen) modzope - (Philipp von Weitershausen) A Zope 3 Book for Beginners - (Tres Seaver) Goldegg Zope X3 Final Released! Zope X3 3.0 final has been released, after almost three years of development (see http://zope.org/Products/ZopeX3/3.0.0final/ZopeX3-3.0.0-Release) Give some thanks to the developers who made this possible, and the companies who funded the development! Learn more about Zope 3 with the link above and in the developers wiki at http://dev.zope.org/Zope3 Jim Fulton Zope X3.1 Plans After our initial release of Zope X3.0, we are beginning to contemplate an X3.1 release, possibly as early as January 2005. Since the X3.0 release, progress on simplifying the component architecture has continued. Notably: - The presentation service has been merged into the adapter service. Now views are really registered and looked up exactly like other adapters, although the old programming APIs still exist. - The browser menu service has been removed. Now menus are implemented as adapters. There has been a lot of work on new features. In some cases, features may still not be solid enough for inclusion for Zope X3.0. Likely candidates for 3.1 include the following: - Session support - A new pluggable authentication service based (philosophically) on the Zope 2 Pluggable Authentication Service. - Principal group support - Basic cataloging support, including a framework that allows multiple catalogs and other indexing objects to be searched and results combined. - A new "source" framework, similar to the vocabulary framework, that supports selection of values from collections of values that are too large to be listed. And, of course, bug fixes continue. Martijn Faassen Five The Five developers have created Five, a Zope 2 product that allows you to integrate Zope 3 technologies into Zope 2, today. Five works with a straight Zope 2.7. It right now allows you to use the following Zope 3 technologies in Zope 2: * Zope 3 interfaces * adapters * pages (views), including skins and layers * ZCML It is possible to add Zope 3 style views to your own Zope 2 objects, or to existing ones, even normal Folders! Five is currently in release 0.2b and steaming along. It's even used in a production Plone site (Oxfam America, done by Enfold systems). There was also quite a bit of Five buzz at EuroPython, the Castle sprint, and the Plone conference. Download, documentation and developer info can be found here: http://codespeak.net/z3/five/ Zope 3 Base Zope 3 Base -- "All your bobobase are belong to us" The Zope 3 Base project aims to offer an approachable area for developers of Zope 3 related software. It sits somewhere been the CMF collective and the zope.org repository; less chaotic than the collective, but more freewheeling than the zope.org repository. The projects Five and Sqlos (SQLObject integration into Zope 3) are the most actively developed projects in the base right now, but there's room for more! If you have a Zope 3 project and you'd like to publish it and develop it further with a group, and for whatever reason you don't feel ready to contribute it to the zope.org repository, the Zope 3 base is there for you. Talk to us! We've got an irc channel: #z3-base on freenode.net. The Zope 3 base has possibly the cutest Zope 3 related website on the web. Admittedly that isn't hard at this stage: http://codespeak.net/z3/ Andy Adiwidjaja, Janko Hauser union.cms: Real-World Usage of Five union.cms (http://dev.unioncms.org/utrac) is an effort of the biggest union in Germany to develop a new GPL licensed content management system building on the experiences of the current Zope 2 content management systems such as Plone and CPS. Starting with homegrown backports of parts of Zope 3 like the adapter mechanism, the developers of union.cms were some of the early adopters of Five (http://codespeak.net/z3/five/) a product developed by Infrae that brings many of the most important technologies of Zope 3 into the world of Zope 2 development. The union ver.di has strong requirements for content reuse and heavy multi-site setups. It wants to consolidate all the different web sites into one centralized managed system. For this each site must be configured in a controlled but flexible way. Thanks to Five, union.cms now uses schemas and widgets to develop content objects easily, which are assembled into documents. Content objects and documents are stored in a central repository and can be placed in pages to build different site hierarchies, which serve as one of many possible views on the content of a site. A channel mechanism will allow the reuse of basic content and complete documents between the many different sites. View classes are used to attach different views to the various objects in a site or the repository. With this basic separation of content and views, different concepts like in-site editing or workspace-based editing can be mixed. With the help of adapters, new functionality can be added to each object in a site without the need to deploy new basic content types. Overall there will be a stronger separation between basic content and applications working on this content. ver.di will support the further development of union.cms in the coming year, and plan to migrate most of the current sites to the new system. Several other German unions have already signaled their interest in adopting union.cms in the future. We as developers are happy to have such strong technologies at our disposal and are amazed how much work is already done. We hope to make further good usage of these powerful software frameworks. Philipp von Weitershausen modzope Back in May on an 8 hour train ride, I tried to prove that Zope 3 was not only extensible and highly customizable at the application level but also at the low level parts such as the HTTP server. Since I didn't know twisted, I tried mod_python, the Apache 2 module that allows one to write handlers in Python. By the time the train pulled into a station, I was able to load a Zope 3 instance within mod_python and process Apache requests using zope.publisher by adapting them to IBrowserRequest. It still got a few things wrong, e.g. URL path segments, etc. but these only require minor adjustments. My conclusion was that zope.publisher and its peripherical components in zope.app.publication are unnecessarily complicated. Despite this, it seems quite possible to use a different HTTP server machinery. I have not had the time yet to get it working 100%. I have also not thought about threading issues and the like. If anyone with Apache (and possibly mod_python) experience wants to pick it up, feel free to do so! The source code is available under the ZPL at the z3base, http://codespeak.net/svn/z3/modzope/trunk. Lightning talk presentation at EuroPython: http://philikon.de/files/ep2004-modzope-lightning-talk.pdf A Zope3 Book for Beginners At the end of last year, I had the itch of improving Zope 3 documentation for beginners. Beginners meaning people with web application experience (e.g. Zope 2), but no Zope 3 knowledge whatsoever. I finally decided to scratch that itch by writing a Zope3 book. At that point I would like to thank Jim and Stephan who encouraged me to go for it. Then, after knocking on many doors and receiving many rejections due to supposedly unsuccessful Zope 2 books, German-based Springer Verlag decided in May to publish my book! Since then I have been writing on it constantly and if everything goes according to plan, it will be available in stores by January. The book's target audience are web developers. Knowledge of Python is assumed. The first part tries to flatten the Zope 3 learning curve by gradually introducing the Component Architecture and other basic concepts, the second and third parts focus on the numerous features that the Zope X3.0 release brings with it. I hope that the book will close the gap that Stephan's book has intentionally left open--a thorough introduction for people coming from Zope 2 and other web technologies. Special sections compare Zope 3 features and concepts with their predecessors from Zope 2, thus ease the migration process. Though published by a German company, the book is written in English and published internationally. I would like to thank those people who have given me their invaluable technical and non-technical advice and made the whole project possible, most importantly Jan Smith, Sidnei da Silva, Fred L. Drake, and Paul Everitt. Tres Seaver Goldegg At the Castle Sprint 2004[1], representatives from the major Zope2-based CMS projects met to discuss common needs and possible collaborations in the Zope3 CMS space. The major result of the sprint was an agreement to work together, under the ZPL but outside the Zope3 core, in a project nicknamed "Goldegg" (for the castle). The group outlined requirements for common infrastructure[2], and prototyped several features, including Xickens[3] (a minimal content management application, designed as an integration testbed for other components), and XickenPipes (a "pipeline" model for enhancing a site's UI after the initial, application-driven rendering). The group really enjoyed[4] the chance to work together, and organized a mailing list[5] for future collaborative work. [1] "Sprint Announcement", http://plone.org/events/sprints/castlev2/ [2] "Sprint Wiki", http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/ CastleSprint2004 [3] "Xickens SVN", http://codespeak.net/svn/z3/xicken/ [4] "Castle Sprint Pictures", http://marx.jamkit.com/plonephotos/castle.zip [5] "Goldegg mailing list information", http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/goldegg

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Zope X3 3.0.0 final released
by Stephan Richter 07 Nov '04

07 Nov '04

Dear Zope Community, The Zope 3 development team is proud to announce Zope X3 3.0.0 final. After almost three years of development it has finally arrived! Zope X3 is the next major Zope release and has been written from scratch based on the latest software design patterns and the experiences of Zope 2. The "X" in the name stands for "experimental", since this release does not try to provide any backward-compatibility to Zope 2. Zope is an open source web application server primarily written in the Python programming language. It features a transactional object database which can store not only content and custom data, but also dynamic HTML templates, scripts, a search engine, and relational database (RDBMS) connections and code. It features a strong through-the-web development model, allowing you to update your web site from anywhere in the world. To allow for this, Zope also features a tightly integrated security model. Built around the concept of "safe delegation of control", Zope's security architecture also allows you to turn control over parts of a web site to other organizations or individuals. Zope users include Viacom, Boston.com, Lufthansa, SGI, AARP, Bell Atlantic Mobile (now Verizon Wireless), Red Hat, NASA, the US Navy, ishophere.com, i-Gift, IDG (Brazil), GE, Digital Garage, Verio, www.HireTechs.com, Park City Ski Area, and Storm Linux. Downloads http://zope.org/Products/ZopeX3 Installation instructions for both Windows and Un*x/Linux are now available in the top level README.txt of the distribution. The binary installer is recommended for Windows. Add-on packages will also be available at http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope3-Packages Documentation There are several documentation sources for learning Zope 3. - "Zope 3 Developers Book":http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Zope3Book. This book will be published later this year by Sams Publishing. - "Zope 3 Programmer Tutorial":http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ProgrammerTutorial - The "API Doc Tool" is available as part of the Zope 3 online help. Once you started Zope 3, you can reach it via 'http://localhost:8080/++apidoc++'. - "Zope 3 Developer Info":http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Zope3DeveloperInfo - "Web Component Development with Zope 3" is a second Zope 3 book that will be out in January 2005 by Springer Verlag. Resources - "Zope 3 Development Web Site":http://dev.zope.org/Zope3 - "Zope 3 Dev Mailing List":http://mail.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev - IRC Channel: #zope3-dev at irc.freenode.net Notes - On Windows, you must uninstall any previous installation of Zope X3 before installing the new release. - Zope X3 depends on 'zlib', which is usually compiled into Python by default, but if your system does not have the 'zlib' library installed, it will skip to build the 'zlib' module. - When creating the Zope 3 installation using the 'configure'/'make' process, a few tests will sometimes fail, if you specify a relative 'prefix' path. If this happens to you, just use the absolute path. Acknowledgements Thanks goes to everyone that contributed. Albertas Agejevas, Steve Alexander, Don Baarda, Volker Bachschneider, Anthony Baxter, Michael Bernstein, Stuart Bishop, R. Sean Bowman, Axel Bringenberg, Tom Cameron, Godefroid Chapelle, Fred Drake, Phillip Eby, Ulrich Eck, Bruce Eckel, Suresh Babu Eddals, Paul Everitt, Martijn Faassen, David Fregon, Jim Fulton, Marius Gedminas, Shane Hathaway, Christian Heimes, Eckart Hertzler, Any Hird, Michael Howitz, Dominik Huber, Jeremy Hylton, Roger Ineichen, Richard Jones, Andreas Jung, Alexander Limi, Kevin Littlejohn, Chris McDonough, Mark McEahern, R. David Murray, Gustavo Niemeyer, Scott Pascoe, Tim Peters, Gary Poster, Kiki Pruvot, Sathya Rangaswami, Stephan Richter, Paul Roe, Guido van Rossum, Alan Runyan, Tres Seaver, Sidnei da Silva, Peter Simmons, Garret Smith, Jan Smith, Adam Summers, Kapil Thangavelu, Christian Theune, Bjorn Tillenius, Dimitry Vasiliev, Richard Volpato, Barry Warsaw, Gregoire Weber, Philipp von Weitershausen, Paul Winkler, Chris Withers, Nathan Yergler, Rob Zaar, Viktorija Zaksiene Enjoy! The Zope 3 Development Team

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[ANN] PloneCollectorNG 1.2.5. (SECURITY RELEASE)
by Andreas Jung 06 Nov '04

06 Nov '04

I am pleased to announce the release of PloneCollectorNG 1.2.5 (PCNG) PloneCollectorNG is a Plone-based bugtracking solution and framework. This release is a **SECURITY** release and fixes a severe problem which is present in **all** PloneCollectorNG versions released so far. All PloneCollectorNG users are encouraged to upgrade to this release as soon as possible. Documentation: http://www.zopyx.com/OpenSource/PloneCollectorNG Download: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=55262&package_id=96051 Andreas Jung zopyx.com - Software Development and Consulting Andreas Jung

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ANNOUNCE: Pound - reverse proxy and load balancer - v1.8
by Robert Segall 04 Nov '04

04 Nov '04

This is to announce the release of Pound v1.8. Changes in this version: - added support for non-blocking connect(2) - added support for 414 - Request URI too long - added RedirectRewrite directive - to prevent redirect changes - added support for NoHTTPS11 value 2 (for MSIE clients only) - added support for HTTPSHeaders 3 (no verify) Problems fixed: - fixed bug if multiple listening ports/addresses - fixed memory leak in SSL - flush stdout (if used) after each log message - assumes only 304, 305 and 306 codes to have no content - fixed problem with delays in 302 without content - fixed problem with time-outs in HTTPS Enhancements: - improved threads detection code in autoconf - added supervisor process disable configuration flag - tweak for the Location rewriting code (only look at current GROUP) - improved print-out for client certificate information The software is at version 1.8 (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 5.5 million requests per day, peaking at over 450 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 Pound has its own mailing-list - just send a message to pound-subscribe(a)apsis.ch in order to join. 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] TextIndexNG 2.1.1 released
by Andreas Jung 01 Nov '04

01 Nov '04

I am pleased to announce the release of TextIndexNG 2.1.1 Changes in 2.1.1: - improved encoding handling in Winword converter (patch by Osma Suomine) - TXNG tries to guess the mimetype as fallback for files with mimetype application/octet-stream files (patch by Osma Suomine) - improved handling of Searchable + enabled converters (patch by Osma Suomine) - added manage_cleanVocabulary() to clean up the vocabulary from no longer existing terms - a phrase search no longer raises an exception if the phrase contains the words 'and', 'or', 'not' or 'near'. This means you can use these terms safely within a phrase search. TextIndexNG homepage: http://www.zopyx.com/OpenSource/TextIndexNG

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