Zope X3 Milestone Release 3 is available for download:

What is Zope X3? It's Zope 3 "experimental". This is the release that will provide the new features of Zope 3 without any Zope 2 support. Zope 3.0 will provide support for Zope 2 content and products, probably using conversion utilities of some sort.

A lot of work has been done since the last release, including:

- General UI improvements

- Major changes have been made to the way local components are registered in a first step toward simplifying local (through the web) component registration.

- The interface framework has been refactored in major ways:

* Object interfaces are declared differently.

* Interface introspection and component registry lookup performance has been improved.

* Interface are now inherited.

- Added a framework for decorators, which are context wrappers that also ease integration with the Zope application framework.

- Configuration of the application server using a ZConfig-syntax configuration file with a simple schema. This replaces zserver.zcml.

- New schema field types for vocabularies. See schema/vocabularies.txt for detailed documentation.

- Added low-level support in TALES for path expressions of the form 'a/b:c', which work by finding an adapter named 'b' for the object named by 'a' and traversing the adapter with the name 'c'.

Also defined and registered an adapter named 'zope', that provides a number of handy functions. For example, to gewt an object's name, use::

someobject/zope:name

Many more utility functions will be added over time.

We still need a way to define other adapters. The mechanism for doing so is still undecided.

- Added zope.app.zapi module that collects common application functions and other objects. This is to simplify imports for application code. To get at many common objects, you can simply import zapi and then access the functions through zapi::

from zope.app import zapi

...

adapter = zapi.getAdapter(x, IFoo)

- Added a pluggable authentication service. The service supports pluggable principal sources and authentication methods (through views on principal sources).

Deprecated the simple auth service.

- Initial implementation of file-system synchronization. This allows:

* Checking out objects from Zope to files in a local directory

* Checking in Zope objects, with conflict resolution

* Exporting objects

* Importing objects

(We need docs for this.)

- Very preliminary local interface service

The interface service will someday provide a tool for browsing and modifying all of the configurations for a interface (type).

The initial version demostrates browsing component configurations be showing you all views configured for an interface.

- WebDAV:

Added PROPFIND and MKCOL to DAV support. Also added IDAVSchemaService, to allow registering an adapter to be used for a given namespace on PROPFIND requests.

- Performance improvements (much more to come)

This release is much less slow than the previous release.

Much thanks to everone who contributed to this release:

Steve Alexander, Stephan Richter, Marius Gedminas, Albertas Agejevas, Viktorija Zaksiene, Jeremy Hylton, Guido van Rossum, Fred Drake, R. David Murray, Martijn Faassen, Philipp von Weitershausen, Sidnei da Silva, Barry Warsaw, Tim Peters, Ulrich Eck, Godefroid Chapelle , Shane Hathaway, Tres Seaver, Gary Poster , Christian Theune, Alan Runyan, Andreas Jung, Kapil Thangavelu, Florent Guillaume, R. Sean Bowman, Axel Bringenberg, Christian Heimes, Paul Everitt, Itamar Shtull-Trauring, Naveen P, Rakesh Naidu , Suresh Babu Eddala, Sushant Kumar Rath, Deb Hazarika, S. Raju , Paul Winkler, Chris McDonough, Ken Manheimer, Nathan R. Yergler, Michael Howitz, Roger Ineichen, Benjamin Saller, Joachim Werner, Matt Hamilton, Volker Bachschneider, Casey Duncan, Anthony Baxter, Gregoire Weber, Holger Krekel, K.Narasimha Murthy , Alexander Limi, Jan-Wijbrand Kolman, Phillip Eby, Christian Zagrodnick, Vincenzo Di Somma, Yvo Schubbe, Bernhard Buehlmann, Heimo Laukkanen, Magnus Heino, and Guido Wesdorp

Requirements

Zope3 requires Python 2.2.3 or later and PyXML 0.8.1 or higher. PyXML can be downloaded from http://sf.net/projects/pyxml

Downloads

- Source release: http://dev.zope.org/Members/jim/ZopeX3-0.0m3.tgz.

Follow the instructions for building from source in README.txt.

- A windows binary release: http://dev.zope.org/Members/jim/ZopeX3-0.0m3.zip.

This is an "in-place" build. Just unzip it and run it. Use Python 2.2 and skip the building part of the instructions.

Jim