Here's my current understanding of the Zope 4 roadmap. Zope 4 ------ Significant progress has already been made on the following features and I expect they should all land in time for a Zope 4 release: - Storing parent pointers (elro, davisagli): we have a branch of Zope that changes OFS to store parent pointers on objects implementing ILocation and fixed the issues that arose in copy/cut/paste and zexp export code. There's an issue remaining with Acquisition, where we lost some protection against cycle protection - Hanno continues working on this. See also: http://wiki.zope.org/zope2/SetParentAndNameInOFS - Remove XML zexp export (davisagli). - Catalog using intids (rossp): we have branches of Zope, ZCatalog and CMF which change the catalog to use intids as their internal uid and rid. This needs more testing, but looks very promising. Currently it uses plone.app.intid / five.intid to maintain an intid to physical path mapping. Once the parent pointer work is stable, we can stop doing this and load objects directly from the database connection - Chameleon (chaoflow): Florian worked on making Zope use Chameleon by default. This works for the most parts, but there's some problems left in tests, as Chameleon wants an utility to be registered but a lot of tests in Zope and CMF don't use ZCML test layers. - WebOb (garbas): Rok worked on bringing in WebOb as an underpinning for the request/response objects and making both API's available at the same time. I think the request is done and a good deal of the response works. Doing this means we can deprecate parts of the old request API and encourage the use of the more standard WebOb API. - WSGI (matthewwilkes, hannosch): We fixed the bugs that had been reported about using the current WSGI support (mod_wsgi problems, forced dependency on repoze.who) on trunk and the 2.13 branch. Afterwards Matthew continued on a branch to remove the ZServer/medusa from Zope and leave only the WSGI publisher in place. - Decorators for AccessControl (chaoflow). Future releases (Zope 5, 6, etc.) --------------------------------- There has been some discussion on these topics but not much in the way of code yet: - Traversal Simplification. Remove attribute lookup from default traversal. - Unicode IDs in OFS - Remove __allow_access_to_unprotected_subobjects__=1 from OFS.SimpleItem.Item - New ZMI - Move authentication out to WSGI middleware. Long term --------- - Move to WebOb as our request object. The wider Python web framework community seems to have settled on WebOb as their request object of choice, so to facilitate sharing of software components with other projects we should consider making WebOb our request object too (instead of just wrapping it). This will require buy-in from the wider ZTK community as the ZTK components will need - Move to Python 3. Laurence