April 2005 - Zope-Dev

Event & Timer Service for Zope 2.8
by Andrew Veitch 26 Jul '05

26 Jul '05

I noticed there was a thread last month on an event service for Zope. Did that reach any conclusion? From what I can see the present products are: - http://www.zope.org/Members/lstaffor/Xron - Zope 2.6 only, not being developed - http://zope.org/Members/naumen/NauScheduler - shipped with one of the Zope CMS's works fine with 2.7 - http://dev.legco.biz/products/ZopeScheduler and http://dev.legco.biz/products/timerservice - works fine with 2.7 too - http://cvs.zope.org/Products/Event/ - event service without a time service, not sure of development status - http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-cmf/2005-January/021747.html - Dieter's project to be based on Python's sched module - http://api.nuxeo.org/CPS3/public/ CPSCore.EventServiceTool.EventServiceTool-class.html - CPS's event service - http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/mailmanager/ mailmanager/MailCheckThread.py?rev=1.15 - our custom scheduler for MailManager - Zope X3's event service It would be great to some consolidation of all of this into the core. I would also strongly favour a timer service along with the event service. I know that the argument has always been that operating systems provide time services but this is not very convenient for cross platform development and on some Windows platforms it's difficult. A -- Logical Progression Ltd, 20 Forth Street, Edinburgh EH1 3LH, UK Tel: +44 (0)131 550 3733 Web: http://www.logicalprogression.net/

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RAMcache and container vs. context
by Paul Winkler 28 May '05

28 May '05

I never noticed this before today, but apparently RAMCacheManager is sensitive to whether cached items are acquired from the context or from the container. (Zope 2.7.3 but afaict it should behave the same in any recent version). Is that intended behavior or is this a bug? Let's say I have a CMF site at http://foo:8080/TheSite. And a template at /TheSite/portal_skins/custom/template1 which looks in part like like: ... Let's say that expensive_script is also in portal_skins/custom and is associated with a RAMCacheManager. Let's say that there are *no* request variables configured for this RAMCacheManager, which would seem to indicate that we consider all calls to expensive_script equivalent regardless of the request. If I visit http://foo:8080/TheSite/page1, which page makes use of this template, and I reload several times, and look at the RAMCacheManager statistics view, I see several hits for /TheSite/expensive_script. Every time I reload, the hit count goes up by one. So far so good. But if I then visit another page, http://foo:8080/TheSite/page2, which uses the same template, I get a miss and the entry count goes up by one. Reloading then gives me a hit, presumably from the new entry. If I browse around the site, the entry count increments for every new page I hit. Remember that I have nothing configured in the "REQUEST Variables" field. So the script should be the same regardless of the request right? This was puzzling me until, on a hunch, I looked at the calling template and changed it from this: ... ...to this: ... And presto, I now get only one entry, and every page on the site gives me a hit from that one entry. Is this really intended behavior? It's not obvious to me from the code why this is happening (or why it might be desirable). The cache manager stores and looks up items by their getPhysicalPath(), so I don't see why context vs. container is relevant. If I'd wanted the URL to be relevant, I would have put that in the REQUEST Variables configuration. This could be a performance hit for the unwary ... aside from all the unnecessary misses, we'd be using RAM on the order of N * M * S where N is number of cached items and M is number of pages in the site, and S is average size of return value. We only should be using N * S. -- Paul Winkler http://www.slinkp.com

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Using Pyrex (with BTrees)?
by Andreas Jung 02 May '05

02 May '05

Has anyone tried to use Pyrex with BTree datastructures? I tried to use Pyrex to optimize a bottleneck in TextIndexNG3 where an iteration over a list of word ids (and insertion into an IOBTree) takes very long. Unfortunately the C extension produced by Pyrex behaves differently from the original code because several unittests do fail...anyone with similar experiences? Andreas

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how to capture testrunner output
by Simon Michael 30 Apr '05

30 Apr '05

Hi all. How would I capture the output of test.py ? 2>&1 seems not to help. Also, shouldn't it exit with a failure code when tests fail ? If anyone has made this work, I'd appreciate hearing about it. Cheers -Simon

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Uploading Windows release 2.8b1
by Christian Theune 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

Hi, the upload didn't work again. If someone could put the file located at http://amy.gocept.com/~ctheune/Zope-2.8.0-b1-win32.exe to the right place? The proxy on Zope.org caught me again. Cheers, Christian -- gocept gmbh & co. kg - schalaunische str. 6 - 06366 koethen - germany www.gocept.com - ct(a)gocept.com - phone +49 3496 30 99 112 - fax +49 3496 30 99 118 - zope and plone consulting and development

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Zope 2.7.6 final release delayed
by Andreas Jung 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

I will release 2.7.6 final on Friday and not today (as planned) because to a tight schedule and some travelling. Andreas

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RE: [Zope-dev] Re: ZEO, FastCGI and Shibboleth
by John Snowdon 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Thanks Zac... it doesn't appear as if there is an easy way around the ZEO problem, without involving another large amount of complexity. I'll bump heads with a few of the local Zope gurus and also see if the Pound (our http load balancer of choice) developers have any suggestions. Cheers John Snowdon - IT Support Specialist -==========================================- School of Medical Education Development Faculty of Medical Sciences Computing University of Newcastle >-----Original Message----- >From: zope-dev-bounces(a)zope.org >[mailto:zope-dev-bounces@zope.org] On Behalf Of Zachery Bir >Sent: 26 April 2005 16:37 >To: zope-dev(a)zope.org >Subject: [Zope-dev] Re: ZEO, FastCGI and Shibboleth > > >On 2005-04-25 06:58:17 -0400, "John Snowdon" ><J.P.Snowdon(a)newcastle.ac.uk> said: > >> Has anyone any thoughts about how to go about shibboleth enabling a >> whole host of ZEO instances... without each one having an >Apache server >> sitting in front of it? Or is there an alternative method >out there that >> perhaps is not widely known? > >We'd contemplated doing more work with PAS and Shibboleth to actually >get Zope to do the equivalent of mod_shibboleth, but it never went >anywhere. We stick Zope behind Apache (or some other proxying system - >Squid, et al.) as a matter of course, so it was a no-brainer to just >use mod_shibboleth in situ. > >We've posted the contents (modulo any specific policy) of our >Shibboleth implementation for PAS. It amounts to a few Scriptable >Plugins to handle the specific HTTP headers that get scribbled on a >Shibboleth session. Here's the message: > > <http://mail.zope.org/pipermail/zope-pas/2005-March/000314.html> > >Zac

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Windows Binaries for 2.8b1
by Christian Theune 27 Apr '05

27 Apr '05

Hi, and again, I got to complain about building Zope on Windows. This time it's the 2.8 branch again with the 2.8b1 release. It looks like the WinBuilders aren't taken care for at all. The ZClass tests didn't got into the procedure of getting packaged so I had to copy those files manually for running the tests. Then the doctest module doesn't comply with platform independent handling of path names using 'variable.split("/")' and relatives. The now running tests fail pretty much in various places (Catalog, ZODB, ...) I'm not able to do any work on this as I'm lacking time. I took the job of building the releases as long as it's pressing the "do it now button" and running the tests seeing them pass. I did not take the job of cleaning up Zope for Windows. The WinBuilders are a really annoying thing, I'm glad they went away for Zope3. To notice: Zope 2.8a1 has not been available as Windows release and neither will be 2.8b1. You really want to blindly go forward for an RC not having a single external user running any 2.8 release at all? I'm pretty annoyed right now. Cheers, Christian -- gocept gmbh & co. kg - schalaunische str. 6 - 06366 koethen - germany www.gocept.com - ct(a)gocept.com - phone +49 3496 30 99 112 - fax +49 3496 30 99 118 - zope and plone consulting and development

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ZEO, FastCGI and Shibboleth
by John Snowdon 26 Apr '05

26 Apr '05

Hey Zope-Dev, We're currently in the middle of a UK JISC funded project to evaluate the use of Shibboleth in authenticating access to electronic learning resources in a Medical Education environment... we use Zope and ZEO extensively already, in providing an online learning environment, personal diaries and progress portfolios and many other aspects of the MB BS degree scheme here at Newcastle. I've been looking at the ways in which others have 'shibbolized' their Zope systems... and most (well, the only ones I can find any technical documentation on) have used the Apache + FastCGI approach, along with the RemoteUserFolder product. I've already had test infrastructure in place and have tested with client side certificates in place of a working Shibboleth server (passing the Client cert CN as the remote user variable) and everything works rather well. The problem I'm facing is that the vast majority of the services we offer are hosted on multiple ZEO nodes, behind a load balancing front end server. This was a completely new infrastructure put in place less than a year ago - replacing a monolithic (and ageing!) Sun Enterprise system... Each node is lightweight, hosting only a ZEO instance... a physically separate Apache server is used very rarely, and mainly only for serving static content (static content URLs are caught by the load balancer and sent off to Apache)... this setup has given us excellent performance, and reducing Apache to a static content serving role has simplified things greatly... so we are reticent to change this. The only way I can see the Apache/FastCGI/ModShibboleth and Zope/RemoteUserFolder setup working, is if each ZEO instance has its own Apache server sitting in front of it.... which is something we have moved away from for obvious reasons. Has anyone any thoughts about how to go about shibboleth enabling a whole host of ZEO instances... without each one having an Apache server sitting in front of it? Or is there an alternative method out there that perhaps is not widely known? I know Zope4EDU is enabled, out of the box, but the licensing costs are simply not affordable for the number of hosts (6 discrete hosts), sites (at least half a dozen) and cpu's (12/14+) that we would be using... Regards -John John Snowdon - IT Support Specialist -==========================================- School of Medical Education Development Faculty of Medical Sciences Computing University of Newcastle

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Raw-input control for input widgets
by Jim Fulton 25 Apr '05

25 Apr '05

I'd like to have more control over input widgets. I'd like to have a way to get, set, and clear their raw input. The main use case for this is to be able to store unprocessed raw inputs: - in wizards or multi-page forms - to allow a user to leave a task and return to it later A secondary use case is to allow inputs to be cleared so that user inputs aren't displayed after a form is redisplayed after acting on previous inputs. I believe we discussed this a couple of years ago, but nothing was ever done. Thoughts? Unfortunately, I don't think we can do anything for this before 3.2. Jim -- Jim Fulton mailto:jim@zope.com Python Powered! CTO (540) 361-1714 http://www.python.org Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com http://www.zope.org

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