January 2000 - Zope-Dev

RE: [Zope-dev] Product standardization
by Amos Latteier 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Brian Lloyd wrote: > I'll speak up :^) I agree that there should be more/better > documentation on the writing of Zope products - there is > some good info out there though: > > The Boring product: > > http://www.zope.org/Members/gtk/Boring > > The (excellent) Product API tutorial: > > http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/howto/ProductAPITutorial > > > Of course I will also admit that it's non-obvious how to > find these gems and that it would be quite a bit better if > there was "offical documentation". The current plan as I > understand it is to work on getting an enhanced and updated > version of the information in the ProductAPI tutuorial into > the Zope Developer's Guide. I am very slowing working on a Zope Developer's Guide. This will be a large Guide that covers things like building Python Products, ZClasses, ZPublisher, etc. Unfortunately this is a very large project and my time is very limited. We also have plans for eventually getting authoritative API documentation in place. However, this effort is not very mature yet. My hope is that we can soon move to a situation in which Guides are available through CVS and folks who are interested can participate directly in writing and editing them. This should speed up the process and also give folks advanced access to stuff if they'd like. > > > I like the idea > > > of having a slightly more formal definition of what > > constitutes a "good" > > > product, even if that definition only consisted of a couple > > of pages of > > > "shoulds" and "shouldn't"s. > > I think that this should be a part of the introductory material > for the "how to write a product" documentation... I agree. I think this is tutorial style information. > > > I also like the idea of a loose sort of > > > peer review (other than someone just downloading the > > product, finding > > > out it doesn't work, and posting to the mail lists). I think that this is a great idea. The main problem with it is that it is a lot of work to review someone's product. I think it would take me a couple hours to go through someone's code and try to figure out how it works and how it could be improved. I personally don't have this kind of time, but others may. > > Yes, that's another way to get the ball running quickly. > How do we set > > this up, > > though? Some procedures would be in order. I've whipped up a > > suggestion: ... > I think that peer review is a Good Thing - I share the opinion that > it should be strictly voluntary and very light weight (in fact, I > think that zope-dev would be a fine place for these types of > discussions, rather than a separate list). My only caveat is: it will > be much easier to "review" a product once there is an official > description of what a good product is - so I would say that the > immediate burden is on _us_ to get that out. Can you comment on this > Amos? As I stated above, we need to finish and make available more Zope Product tutorial information. I don't think that we need an official good-Product description. That said, here's a quick list of what I think a good product should do: * correctly subclass existing Zope classes * correctly handle permissions * correctly handle persistence * present a reasonable HTML UI to users * present a reasonable API to DTML programmers * include some documentation A good product mostly is one that works correctly ;-) Of course there are gray areas, like what is a reasonable HTML UI? And how should you decide what methods should be protected by what permissions? For questions like these I agree that we should come up with some recommended practices. As for getting this done I see this general procedure: 1. identifying areas that need recommendations 2. proposing recommendations 3. reviewing recommendations 4. blessing recommendations I think much of this work can be accomplished on the Zope-dev list with Zope community members and DC folks working together. (I think of these as Zope community recommended practices, not DC recommended practices.) I personally would be most interested in working on step 3. BTW, when recommendations get to the blessing stage we may want to revise Zope itself to follow the recommendation. -Amos -- Amos Latteier mailto:amos@digicool.com Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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How do index the contents of a File?
by Carlos Henrique Bauer 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Hi, I created a ZCatalog to index all the contents of a site. To index the contents of the documents I added a 'raw' text index to the catalog, but it seems to be working just with DTML Documents. Do I need to add another index to the catalog to make it index File documents or is it a ZCatalog bug? Best regards, -- Carlos Henrique Bauer

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Permissions interface improvement request
by R. David Murray 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Perhaps this has been brought up before, and perhaps there is some other place I should submit it (if so, let me know). Also of course let me know if there is some way to do this and I'm just not seeing it. In working with the security screens in zope I have one major problem with the interface. I have a site, and at the top level I define some new roles and give them some global permissions. Then I have a subfolder. Now, in this subfolder I do *not* want anonymous view access, etc. As far as I can see, the only way to remove anonymous view access is to remove the 'inherit permissions' from those permissions that anonymous has, and then to give them back to those roles that ought to have them. This seems like a lot of work with some potential for mistakes on later updates, when all I really want is a checkbox that says, 'anonymous has no permissions in this folder'. So assuming I'm not overlooking something, I guess my enhancement request is that there be an 'inherit permissions' checkbox for each role as well as for each permission. --RDM

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RE: [Zope-dev] ASP vs Zope vs PHP vs ..?
by Michel Pelletier 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

> -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Waddell [mailto:mwaddell@mwdb.com] > Sent: Friday, January 07, 2000 1:00 AM > To: zope-dev(a)zope.org > Subject: [Zope-dev] ASP vs Zope vs PHP vs ..? > > > I'm an ASP/VB/Site Server developer looking for an > alternative. Zope is > very appealing -- it looks like a great tool supported by a great > community. And I've enjoyed looking at and playing with Python. > > But, I'm uncomfortable with loosing touch with an actual > HTML/ASP document > in an actual file system. I feel weird about the URL that > Zope presents - > there's no simple file name reference, like, > http://www.abc.com/mypage.asp > or http://www.abc.com/mypage2.html. Sorry, but my web > experience expects > that. (This is probably more along the lines of a general zope list question (zope(a)zope.org)) An understandable thing. To me, a filesystem is just another type of data store, just like the Zope database or a relational database. And there's no saying a URL can't at some point be translated *into* a file, its just no one really does it much. I believe a couple different people have come up with products that let you 'mount' a filesystem from Zope. Not so much that there is a reason why there *aren't* filename in Zope URLs, there is a reason why they *are* in other solutions. Zope is a framework, all of it's components exist in an object space that allows them to work together at a fundamental and application like level. > 1. Where can I learn how others have handled the transition > from page-based > publishing to Zope's object-based paradigm? Good question, I don't know. > 2. How do you create/maintain the look of the site? Doesn't > seem feasible > using the Zope control panel. I think you mean the managment interface. Zope's control panel, which is a component of the managment interface, has nothing to do with content managment. > I prefer using HomeSite > (Allaire) for coding > HTML, ASP and any text file. Zope supports FTP, WebDAV, XML-RPC and HTTP 'PUT' style editing. Any editor that supports any one of these can be used with Zope. > MacroMedia DreamWeaver for complex HTML > design/layout. And I like using MS SQL Server (although I could be > converted..) to support data-driven web sites. Zope works just dandy with MS SQL Server like it works with any other relational database, through ZSQLMethods. -Michel

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RE: [Zope-dev] ASP vs Zope vs PHP vs ..?
by Andy Pahne 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

To say it first: I have no experiencce with ASP, but I'm developing a few websites with Zope and a few with PHP at the moment. Zope is very appealing, you are right. But I do not understand your mention above: >But, I'm uncomfortable with loosing touch with an actual HTML/ASP document >in an actual file system. I feel weird about the URL that Zope presents - >there's no simple file name reference, like, http://www.abc.com/mypage.asp >or http://www.abc.com/mypage2.html. Sorry, but my web experience expects >that. In fact, Zope maps objects to URLs, and you access your Zopish objects via URL. So the reference to the object myObj in the root-folder of your Zope-installation gets http://your-server.com/myObj If you like it, you may call your object myObj.asp or myObj.php or even myObj.html. .That's a simple name reference, isn't it? OK, in fact there's more to tell about it, but the strength of aqcusition is one of the more easier concept, and I won't go into detail about that now. We had this thread Zope vs PHP and Zope vs Midgard-Project and Zope vs ASP already, and I decided to use the best out of all worlds. At the moment I'm trying to learn, which technique is the best for a given problem. Andy

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Re: [Zope-dev] multiple ZODB files?
by Tres Seaver 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Jim Fulton wrote: > Michel Pelletier wrote: > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > > From: Anthony Baxter [mailto:anthony@interlink.com.au] > > > Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2000 2:27 AM > > > To: zope-dev(a)zope.org > > > Subject: [Zope-dev] multiple ZODB files? > > > > > > > > > Is it possible to set up a site such that as well as the single > > > Data.fs file, a seperate folder (say, /foo) is loaded from a different > > > ZODB file? In particular, changes to stuff inside /foo should > > > be written > > > to the foo ZODB file. > > > > Not yet, we have not fully thought about this problem of multiple > > databases, > > I'll add that we have thought quite a bit about it, just > not enough. It's harder than one might at first expect. > > > but ZODB was architected to be multi-DB aware. > > Unfortunately, I suspect more architectural work > will be needed too. :( > > Some issues: > > - How to handle references accross databases. > At a basic level, this is not too hard, but... Do it like soft-links across filesystems (i.e., "weak references"). > > - How to handle garbage collection in a multi-db environment. > Oops. Storages are currently responsible for GC. This won't > account for references from other databases. Soft-links in a filesystem don't bump the link count on the target, so the link can be stale: this may be mitigated by the fact that a developer is likely to split the ZODB along "coupling and cohesion" lines, so the number of cross-ZODB links is likely to be small. > > - How do databases get connected, from a UI point of view. > Do you get to specify a database when you add an object? > Any object? Where do databases get defined? > > One idea I just thought of would be to have a databases > area of the control panel where one could add database > objects that modeled root database objects. Then, perhaps > one would do the moral equivalent of a link from an object in > one db to another..... > > - .... There are probably other issues I haven't thought of. > > If anyone wants to work on this, I'd be willing to set up a mailing > list and provide advice. > -- ========================================================= Tres Seaver tseaver(a)palladion.com 713-523-6582 Palladion Software http://www.palladion.com

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RE: [Zope-dev] Some apparent limitations of the Zope security mod el
by Michel Pelletier 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

> -----Original Message----- > From: Ross Boylan [mailto:RossBoylan@stanfordalumni.org] > > > The 3rd reason is practical, rather than fundamental: > 3) If I do it myself, I don't have to worry about getting my > classes, which > I may want to do as simply python objects, to play in the > somewhat hard to > grasp Zope framework. The permission aspect is not difficult at all. One data structure, __ac_permissions__, defines all of the permissions for an object. It is a tuple of tuples: __ac_permissions__=( ('PermissionName', ['method1', 'method2', ...], ['Role1', 'Role2', ...],) ... ) Each permission tuple has three elements, a name, a list of methods that permission 'protects', and a list of Roles which have that permission by default. Of course, you can create new roles in the managment interface or programatically to map to permissions, this is a convinience that allows the object programmer to specify which methods are managment methods and which are accessable by other common roles like 'Anonymous'. Here is an example: __ac_permissions__=( ('Manage Vocabulary', ['manage_main', 'manage_vocab', 'manage_query'], ['Manager']), ('Query Vocabulary', ['query',], ['Anonymous', 'Manager']), ) -Michel

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RE: [Zope-dev] ODMG compliance?
by Tres Seaver 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Michel Pelletier <michel(a)digicool.com> wrote: > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Kenneth Y.K. YOUNG [mailto:kyoung@kyoung.net] > > Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2000 9:12 PM > > To: Zope-Dev Mailing List > > Cc: Hannu Krosing; Anthony Baxter > > Subject: RE: [Zope-dev] ODMG compliance? > > > > > > > > My understanding of ODMG standard is superficial, but the > > motivation of > > examining Zope's standard compliance are as follows: (pls > > correct me if I'm > > wrong) > > > > (1) how well it integrates with Corba - i.e. can I access > > Zope functions > > from programs written in perl/C/smalltalk/Java via corba, and > > have zope > > reuse Corba components written in these languages. > > Corba integration does not exist, but it would not be dificult to do. > As a corba client, you could take some third party python corba package > and integrate it into a Zope product to create "CORBA Methods" that > would word presumably like External Methods. I am working on a Zope product which will use Fnorb (a 99.44% pure Python CORBA 2.2 ORB) to browse the names and objects published in any compliant COSNaming server. Fnorb maps "normal" Python method calls onto CORBA method calls, so once you have the reference (and know the interface), making such calls should be straightforward. > > As a CORBA server you could create a new ZServer module. Remember, > ZPublisher, the 'heart' of Zope, is an Object Request Broker (ORB) that > maps quite cleanly onto CORBA. In the past when ZPublisher was Bobo, I > beleive there was even some work done to make Bobo corba aware, I'm not > certain. > > In any case there has been no demand on us for it for a while now, corba > is not a very active standard. XML-RPC seems to fill it's shoes quite > well. A CORBA server interface (probably using DSI) would be just another access path, like WebDAV or FTP; it would almost certainly have to live inside Medusa to avoid creating synchronization problems with the other protocols. The key problem (as with XML-RPC) is making the interface definitions available to the client -- marshalling the parameters is transparent. Zope's URL-traversal namespace is conceptually quite close to the graph used in COSNaming -- a CORBA client would, however, expect to "know" that some names were "objects", while others were "methods". <OQL discussion snipped due to my ignorance> > > I couldn't tell you, but you could take a hack at it. I belive there > are a couple Python corba packages. Fnorb: http://www.dstc.edu.au/Fnorb Uses C for parsing IDL and marshalling CDR; all else Python. ILU: ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/ilu/ilu.html C core, Python bindings, along with Lisp, Perl, C++ -- ========================================================= Tres Seaver tseaver(a)palladion.com 713-523-6582 Palladion Software http://www.palladion.com

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Zope (ZPublisher, ZODB) *.odm files
by Sascha Matzke 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Hello, I design my zope python products with ObjectDomain. It would be very helpful to have an (readonly) zope modell to make my modells more understandable (e.g. where does this class Persistent come from??)... Are those available to the public ?? Sascha -- .-> Sascha Matzke - sascha(a)bespin.de - http://www.bespin.de -. | Alle Macht den Raeten gegen Staat und Kapital... | | Anarchist Academy | `-- On this earth for 24 years, 85 days <----------------'

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ZCatalog abset id bug
by Jason Spisak 07 Jan '00

07 Jan '00

Zopsters, Can anyone recreate this bug. Zope 2.1.1, Intel RH 6.1, Python 1.5.2 Call CreateInObjectManager of a ZCatalog aware ZClass to create an instance. In the reation method call reindex_object. It gives you an Uncatalog of absent id error. All my best, -- Jason Spisak webmaster(a)hiretechs.com

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