December 2001 - Zope-Dev

ZMailman mailing list
by Stephan Richter 04 Dec '01

04 Dec '01

Hello everyone, I have setup a project page at http://demo.iuveno-net.de/iuveno/Products/ZMailman You can subscribe to the Mailing List there and also get to the CVS. I will give anyone who likes, write access to the CVS and/or the project page. Maybe someone who tried to get my ZMailman proof of concept going on his Zope install could write a how-to and put it on the site? Regards, Stephan -- Stephan Richter CBU - Physics and Chemistry Student Web2k - Web Design/Development & Technical Project Management

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Re: [Zope-Coders] Zope 3; getting in on the act?
by Jim Fulton 04 Dec '01

04 Dec '01

Jim Fulton wrote: > > This is a quick note to let you all know we're glad you are paying attention. > I'm a little pressed for time right now, but I'll make a much fuller > response soon (no latr than Monday) with lots of information and suggestions > on ways to contribute. Well, Tres beat me to the punch a couple of days before I sent my note, but I hadn't caught up enough to see his message. :/ Hopefully, I'll be able to add a little something. We've created two new mailing lists: zope3-dev(a)zope.org, http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev, and zodb4-dev(a)python.org, http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/zodb4-dev to discuss Zope3 and ZODB 4 (the next generation of ZODB, which will be used with Zope 3). As Tres pointed out, the main place to get information is the ComponentArchitecture Wiki: http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture There's a lot of good information there, although it's badly in need of updating, including responsing to comments. I'll try to get a good bit done this week. The Vision Statement at: http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/VisionStat… describes the goals and, at a high level, the approach. See especially the "Proposed Solution" section. There are two reasons why the Wiki has been a bit neglected for the last few weeks: 1. I was focussed on a tutorial, aimed as Python programmers, that described, in a step-by-step detailed way, with an example, how to develop content and components for Zope3. The tutorial is available via CVS in the "Docs" area. You can browse it at: http://cvs.zope.org/Docs/ZopeComponentArchitecture/PythonProgrammerTutorial/ Note that: - Only Chapter 1 is (mostly) done. - The tutorial text is in the README.txt files. - The tutorial is arranged into chapters and the chapters are arranged into steps. The steps are executable Python packages. Step5 of chapter actually worked with the checked in Prototype code (see below) as of this writing. :) 2. When I reached a stable revision of the tutorial, we began working on an evolutionary (we hope) prototype of a future architecture necesary to run the tutorial. We still have a ways to go. While I was working on this document, Shane Hatheway posted an excellent summary and FAQ of some of the recent developmebnts: http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2001-December/014313.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/2001-December/014318.html The first link above includes instructions for checking out the Zope 3x prototype. You can also browse the prototype code at: http://cvs.zope.org/Zope3/?only_with_tag=Zope-3x-branch We'd very much like community involvement at all levels. I encourage people to get involved. The mailing list and Wiki are a good place to start. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (888) 344-4332 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org

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Another open letter. :-)
by Lennart Regebro 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

After the discussion here I'm slowly starting to form a picture in my mind of how to "solve" the "problems". First some basic facts of life: - Zope corp needs to do what Zope corp thinks it can make money on. - "We" (that is the Zope community) need to get some features into the base of Zope because: a. It's not effective that we all solve the same problems independantly. b. Some features are hard to do as products. - It is imperative that there is a single point of control for Zope, ie no branching. This means Zope corp needs to control what goes into Zope, but the community needs to tell them what should go there, and the community has to help to put it in. To achieve this, we need better community support systems. That is, we need a proper community site, with discussion forums, a merged collector/proposal application with proper threaded discussions and applied workflow for proposal states. The projects that get started also need their protected areas on the site with discussion forums and their own CVS trees. In all, this would support a better inflow of comments from the community, it would make it easier for community members to see the responses to their input, and it would be easier to start projects with non ZC people involved in programming. Here are some things that I feel should be introduced into Zope: - Workflow support. (Because everybody needs it) - Versioning. (Because it's hard to do as a product) - Internationalization. (Because it's hard to do as a product) - Better user management. (Because everybody needs it) Also, Zope would benefit from the inclusion of several products that improve the products included in Zope. Many people have found some objects lacking in functionality, and added that functionality and put it up on Zope.org. Many of these improved products could easily replace the products that come with Zope today, thereby giving a better "wow" factor to Zope without much effort. I also feel there are things that could be removed. And now I'm gonna say bad things about parts of zope some people probably love, and they will hate me for this, but I'll have to live with that. This is my view only. I have on occasion been known to be completely wrong. :-) - Don't do any more work on ZClasses, and eventually drop it. To me they do not seem easier to work with than Python, they are messier and not as flexible. - I feel that CMF is a failure. It doesn't do what is promised, it's very hard to understand and many parts of it are simply designed so badly and incorrectly that they are practically useless. Drop CMF. Take the good parts and integrate them directly into the Zope base to make Zope a better platform form content management applications, and forget about the rest.

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How to enhance Zope URI resolver to understand URNs?
by hnorris norris 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

(using friend's email, please reply to cstrong(a)arielpartners.com ) We are putting together a website using Zope. All of our content is stored in XML documents. The documents have links in them, some of which are specified using URNs. The cross links from one local document to another are specified using URNs instead of URLs so that the content remains context-agnostic. In this way, we can map the URN to different URLs depending on the particular Zope instance. We don't want the content to "know" about the particular layout of the ZODB, or even that it happens to be inside Zope at all! (some of our clients use Apache Cocoon, or some other technology) There are three ways I can think of for making this work: 1) Our XSLT transformer could reference a map somewhere and turn the URNs to URLs in the resulting HTML. 2) Our XSLT Transformer could leave the URNs alone, and the Zope URI Resolution mechanism could be enhanced with a lookup table that would map a URN to a URL. Of course, the resolver would be programmed in python with full access to the power of acquisition... [:-)] 3) We could use acquisition directly, but there are two drawbacks a) it still requires knowledge of the layout of the ZODB -- that is, if something is in a particular sub-branch, you might have to use several <dtml-with> statements to make it work. That violates separation of concerns. b) we then have to emulate acquisiton in non-Zope environments. Thoughts, anyone? TIA! --Craeg __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Buy the perfect holiday gifts at Yahoo! Shopping. http://shopping.yahoo.com

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Help! Why is my XML content being munged by <dtml-var>?
by hnorris norris 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

(using friend's email, please reply to cstrong(a)arielpartners.com ) I am noticing the following behavior: I have created lots of content in XML using my own personal DTD. Certain of my XML tags happen to be the same as XHTML tags, except that they are upper case-- for example, <Title></Title> and . When I refer to my XML content (contained in a DTMLDocument or some such) using dtml-var, The tags that look like HTML tags are lowercased! Even worse, ONLY the closing tags are lowercased. Needless to say, this drives my validating parser crazy :-{ It seems Zope is too clever by half: parsing the tags, looking for "HTML" tags, and lowercasing them. I saw some parsing code in DocumentTemplate/DT_HTML.py Is this where it is happening? How can I turn this off? Or, must I use a namespace prefix like <ariel:P></ariel:P> Or not use any tags in XML that look like XHTML <Para></Para> Does anyone have advice for me? Please help! TIA, --Craeg BTW, Here is my XML code: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE Document PUBLIC "-//ArielPartners//DTD XML Block V1.0//EN" "http://www.arielpartners.com/dtd/block.dtd"> <Document> <MetaData> <Author> <PersonName firstName="Brad" lastName="Stern"/> <Affiliation>Ariel Partners</Affiliation> </Author> <Title>Products</Title> <Date m="11" d="21" y="2001"/> <Comment> This is a blurb for xyz </Comment> </MetaData> <Block> this is a block of text. blah blah blah. </Block> </Document> This is stored in my own product, or a DTMLDocument (same behavior either way) called foo. Anyway, when I refer to this via <dtml-var foo>, I get the following: <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE Document PUBLIC "-//ArielPartners//DTD XML Block V1.0//EN" "http://www.arielpartners.com/dtd/block.dtd"> <Document> <MetaData> <Author> <PersonName firstName="Brad" lastName="Stern"/> <Affiliation>Ariel Partners</Affiliation> </Author> <Title>Products</title> <--- munged <Date m="11" d="21" y="2001"/> <Comment> This is a blurb for xyz </Comment> </MetaData> <Block> this is a block of text. blah blah blah. <--- munged </Block> </Document> __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Buy the perfect holiday gifts at Yahoo! Shopping. http://shopping.yahoo.com

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RE: [Zope-dev] ZCatalog becoming empty when using "Update" in con junction with ZPatterns
by sean.upton＠uniontrib.com 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

Are you using any virtual hosting setup of any kind? If so, switching from using a base class of CatalogAware.CatalogAware to CatalogPathAware.CatalogAware might solve this problem... Sean -----Original Message----- From: Jean Jordaan [mailto:jean@upfrontsystems.co.za] Sent: Monday, December 03, 2001 1:59 AM To: zope-dev(a)zope.org Subject: [Zope-dev] ZCatalog becoming empty when using "Update" in conjunction with ZPatterns Hi all I had a ZCatalog with about 3500 DataSkin instances indexed. Then I started to index instances of a regular ZClass as well. Then I added another index, to catalog an additional property of this ZClass, and hit "Update Catalog". When Zope returned from updating, there were no records in the Catalog, though the Vocabulary was intact. I see that I cannot search for the DataSkin metatypes using the "Find Objects" ZCatalog tab: they don't show up in the "Find objects of type" field. So perhaps this is why updating failed. However, now the Catalog is not accepting any entries. I originally did the cataloging using this kind of loop on all the classes I wanted indexed:: ids = container.Roundup.Issues.defaultRack.getPersistentItemIDs() for id in ids: object = container.Roundup.Issues.defaultRack.getItem(id) Catalog.catalog_object( object , string.join( object.getPhysicalPath() , '/')) When I try to run that again, I still get "There are no objects in the Catalog." upon return. When I run it using a newly created catalog ('testCatalog') instead, it works fine. Could anyone perhaps explain what's happening here? Regards, Jean _______________________________________________ Zope-Dev maillist - Zope-Dev(a)zope.org http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** (Related lists - http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )

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Product Development Career
by zaharudin 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

Hi.. I'm a Product Development Engineer from Brunsfield Communication Malaysia. I'm still fresh in this job and need some guideline. My scope of work right now is to study the smart home system. Our company seeking for the manufacturer/principal to get the OEM licences. Please help me, how to perform this task everyday.Feel free to e-mail soden10(a)hotmail.com

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Don't try to index URL (or any other REQUEST property)
by Jean Jordaan 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

Hi all Turns out that one major cause of my ZCatalog hassles was that I had an index called 'URL'. That is, my ZClass had a property called URL, and I was indexing on this. It makes everything in the ZCatalog vanish. "No objects in Catalog". Deleting this index makes everything re-appear again! :) It seems that having indexes with names that appear in the REQUEST object is a definite no-no. Regards, Jean

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Re: [Zope-dev] Open letters, hijacking and the like
by Simon Coles 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

--On Sunday, December 2, 2001 3:08 pm -0800 Clark O'Brien <clark_obrien(a)yahoo.com> wrote: > On the one hand ZC is this munificent benefactor of > Zope. > > On the other hand ZC is this poor cash strapped little > company that can't afford to take any interest in Zope > unless they have an immediate incentive. > > YOU CAN'T HAVE IT BOTH WAYS DUDE. I AM SORRY BUT THIS > IS JUST NOT POSSIBLE. Heh. In the ideal world, this may be true. However, the real world is a balance. Any company that becomes an open-ended "munificent benefactor" either goes bust or becomes a charity - and even charities need revenue. On the other hand, if Zope Corp. become too internally focussed, they lose the community. The trick that ZC is trying to pull off is to fulfill the promise of "The Cathedral and the Bazzar" and make this Open Source thing happen for real. I for one applaud them and really hope they make it (and that Paul & Co. write a book about it for the rest of us to give to investors to get them to buy into our plans :-). Without projects like Zope Corp., Open Source is just going to be a plaything for students and geeks in their spare time. Me, I'd like Open Source to become The Way Software is Developed. Consider - what other companies have someone of Paul's seniority particiapting forums like this? Forgive me for putting words into his mouth, but at Paul's level, you don't muck around, if something is a waste of time, you stop doing it. Generally the things on your radar would be investors, important customers, strategy, and shaping your organisation. The Zope community is obviously valued by Zope Corp., or they'd ignore us. I suggest we need to all join in a constructive, mature conversation about how to make Zope, and Zope Corp's business model a success. If we pull that off, we'll be doing the world of Open Source Software a great service. BTW, Those of you that aren't yet in the business world, or are currently at a level where business issues don't matter that much, I suggest learning from the business perspective of what's going on here will do you a lot of good in your future careers. Zope as a technology will be hot for a comparatively short period compared to the business model. Simon (who just became a CEO himself, and sees the world in a different light now) --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ---------- Simon J. Coles Email: simon(a)nipltd.com New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 753703 http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 753742 =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============

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Idea for 10x Zope - specific distributions
by Simon Coles 03 Dec '01

03 Dec '01

Hi, I've been reading the comments around making Zope 10 times bigger with interest - excellent stuff. Not sure if zope-dev is the place for this, but all the other 10x conversation is here..... Some of you may know that I was pretty involved in NIP's Zope efforts a while ago but have since moved into another area, leaving it in the capable hands of Chris W and Andy D. I still have an interest in Zope both for my personal projects, and because I wish I could use it in my current role :-) Anyway, looking from the semi-outside, I suspect one quick way to make Zope a lot more popular is to package it up in a number of installations which solve a particular problem. Some of us get into Zope because its neat and interesting technology, but most start from wanting to solve a particular problem. For example: - "I want to run something like Slashdot" - "I'd like to run a simple community site for my local club" - "I would like to maintain a web site as painlessly as possible, with some useful functionality" - "I would like to keep a list of my MP3s and serve them out to my home network" - etc. I would suggest if we spend some time looking at those scenarios, and prepared Zope distributions which got people working as quickly as possible, we'd see a lot of interest. Put them up on Freshmeat as their own projects, pointing direct to the relevant page on zope.org. Most other Open Source solutions require a fair amount of installation of different components, which is a fair amount of hassle. Zope has a lot going for it as the basis for a package solution, as it can be completely self contained, and very easily integrated in with Apache if required. Currently, if you want to do anything interesting with Zope, you have to install Zope and then assemble the solution for yourself from a whole bunch of other products. This doesn't have to happen, its just how Zope is currently distributed. (I know there's some work happening on product management infrastructure, but not only will that take time to happen, it also doesn't solve the problem of the documentation etc. which should also be oriented to the specific problem area.) Once someone downloads an scenario-specific version of Zope and puts it to use, chances are their interest will grow and they will start to use it for other things. But that will only happen once they've solved their initial problem. I don't think preparing such distributions will be too hard. "All" it requires is someone to write some documentation and prepare an installation for Win32 and Linux (and possibly MacOS X for the discerning users). I don't even think we need to be too worried about keeping the distributions updated with the latest & greatest Zope + bits, because unless the new version beings something dramatically useful (or is an important security update) it doesn't matter. To prepare these scenario-specific distributions, I believe we need a series of people who are familiar with the particular problem domain and are willing to build distributions, write documentation, and answer domain-specific questions if there are any. I have almost done this for the Open Source ELN (http://www.opensourceeln.org) and will post a recipie on how to create a Win32 distribution in a week or so which other people can use. The documentation will be something like "Install this file, then go to this URL, join the site (it is a CMF-based thing) and enjoy. If you want to get into customisation, you want to mess with the templates you can see at this URL (the skins folder). If you want to know what is going on, read this document and the rest of Zope.org". Short and simple. What do people think? Do you think scenario-specific distributions would have helped you get into Zope? How did you get into Zope? Would/Could you prepare a distribution for people sharing the same problem you started with? Simon --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ---------- Simon J. Coles Email: simon(a)nipltd.com New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 753703 http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 753742 =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============

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