February 1999 - Zope

Documentation & Examples
by Theodore Patrick 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

<FLAME> I hate manuals as do many others. I learn by example. Without good examples of ZOPE DTML, DEVELOPMENT IS DIFFICULT with this great product. I KNOW - "RTFM" but there's barely any DTML in the 1. Z Document Template Markup Language User's Guide 2. Zope Manager's Guide HTML is easy to learn because of VIEW SOURCE. DTML is difficult because of a lack of examples. There are very few examples in the documentation and well commented code is hard to come by anywhere on the ZOPE site, except for 6 great examples in the How-to section. IS there a DTML Code Library for Idiots out there!!! Put together a simple library of code 1. Include clear comments 2. Document individual functions 3. Make it for idiots not code junkies Two things will happen. 1. ALLOT MORE USERS 2. ALLOT MORE SOURCE DTML Everybody Wins!!!! </FLAME> Don't get me wrong! Zope is a fantastic Product and is one of the best application servers on the market for any price. We use it all the time. If someone can prove me wrong, I'll Take it all back! Best, Theodore E. Patrick Indigo Networks email: tpatrick(a)indigonetworks.com <mailto:tpatrick@indigonetworks.com> phone: 615-777-0070 ext.125

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RE: [Zope] Shattered dreams...
by Michel Pelletier 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

> -----Original Message----- > From: Shaw, Howard [mailto:ShawH@STHS.org] > Sent: Thursday, February 11, 1999 3:33 PM > To: 'Zope(a)zope.org' > Subject: [Zope] Shattered dreams... > > > I just finished implementing a complete rewrite a dynamic database > driven set of web pages inside a session. > > I saved the changes to the session, and quit the session. I > immediately > noticed that none of my changes were present. I reopened the session, > and all the changes reappeared, but the option to save the session is > absent. > > Disturbed, I thought it might be some quirk of Netscape caching, so I > cleared the caches, exited netscape, and reentered. > > Now, I can reenter the session at will, but there are no > changes between > being in the session and being out of the session, and all my work is > gone, as far as I can tell. > > A notion of what I did wrong, what happened, and whether there is > anything I can do to recover this work would be greatly appreciated. > First I would suggest backing up your Data.bbb file before trying to debug this. Which version of Zope are you using? Can you reproduce the problem with some less mission critical data? Can you go into the 'Undo' screen and see the transaction commitment? When you 'Save' a session, it prompts you for a Remark, did you fill that out? If so you can see the commitment in the Undo logs (if you didn't fill out the remark, the log is still there, but not too informative). -Michel > _______________________________________________ > Zope maillist - Zope(a)zope.org > http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope >

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Shattered dreams...
by Shaw, Howard 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

I just finished implementing a complete rewrite a dynamic database driven set of web pages inside a session. I saved the changes to the session, and quit the session. I immediately noticed that none of my changes were present. I reopened the session, and all the changes reappeared, but the option to save the session is absent. Disturbed, I thought it might be some quirk of Netscape caching, so I cleared the caches, exited netscape, and reentered. Now, I can reenter the session at will, but there are no changes between being in the session and being out of the session, and all my work is gone, as far as I can tell. A notion of what I did wrong, what happened, and whether there is anything I can do to recover this work would be greatly appreciated.

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RE: [Zope] Product Creation Comments
by Michel Pelletier 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

> -----Original Message----- > From: Mark Millikan [mailto:mmillikan@vfa.com] > Sent: Thursday, February 11, 1999 2:48 PM > To: zope(a)zope.org > Subject: [Zope] Product Creation Comments > > > Martijn Faassen writes: > > --fantastic voyage log deleted-- > > BTW, product modification (after original installation) > appears broken > in 1.10. All of the product info appears to be cached > somewhere -- and > is never updated -- even if all products are removed from the product > folder (the init file is required, however). Any ideas as to what > silliness I may have done to arrive at this state. (My old 1.9 setup > works fine). > This is a newly discovered bug. A side-effect is that debugging products is a bit tough; I add features to a product by coding, breaking it, and successivly fixing the problem. Usualy I go right to the product folder to see if the product is 'un-broken'. With this mystery caching now I have to check to see if the product was added to the 'Add' select list; even if the product is *not* broken it caches the last traceback and says that it is. Jim tried to debug this and it mysteriously disapeared in the debugger, which makes it the worst kind of bug there is, one that goes away when you try to fix it. Did you submit it to the collector? I'm ashamed to say that I've know about it for a day and haven't yet... on the upside your particular aspect of the bug was not known to me, this might help us. -Michel > MAM > > > _______________________________________________ > Zope maillist - Zope(a)zope.org > http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope >

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Product Creation Comments
by Martijn Faassen 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

Hi there, For a while now I've been wrestling with product creation. I have as yet have to finish a product. I've read the 'Approaching the Zope Product API' tutorial, and while I understand it fine (I think), and it explains things just fine, I still find the product creation process too cumbersome for my tastes. This may be me, but perhaps it may help the Zope community if I utter my frustration; at a minimum it'll help me. Also note that as a whole I think Zope is just brilliant. Here are my comments: In Python, testing new code is easy; this is one of the advantages of interpreted languages. It also helps that Python is elegant and gives good error messages. The Emacs python-mode is also very useful. Zope for the most part also displays some of this elegance. Making new web pages is easy; you see results directly. Acquisition combined with DTML is a very powerful system. It's also trivial to add external methods in Python. Zope may however be too big, have too many interesting parts, for a single human to grok it quickly; this may be why we speak of 'Zope Zen'. I think this inevitable as Zope also does a lot. And better documentation may always help. The Product API is an exception; I keep stumbling. It's *not* easy to test new products, or if it is nobody has told me how. I want to know if I'm doing it right while I'm developing a product, and at a certain point there seems to be a looong gap in development where you simply can't test (or I don't know how to). I'll attempt to describe the biggest gap for me; the gap I haven't crossed yet. You can write a Python class that is to be the product. We'll take the poll as an example. First we test it in Python with a test() function. So far so good. That's just regular Python. Then we add the user interface with DTML. After some initial learning with DTML, this step is easy too. It's just a question of importing DocumentTemplate and adding a single attribute to the class (index_html). Minor stumbling block is that the non Zope python doesn't have the Zope modules on its module search path. Adding them resolves this; I'm not sure however if I fixed it completely (insert completely vague failures and complaints here :). You can test the generated HTML easily in a python test function, then. Minor step. Then we have a publishable object. We can test it with a test_poll.py file that creates the object to be published. We can call the Zope debugger to see if it all comes out okay. No problem. Now we try to make the leap from publishable object to Zope product. The tutorial says there is a long way between these two; and there is! The big gap trouble starts here. Suddenly, we don't import DocumentTemplate anymore, instead we do a 'from globals import HTMLFile' for general DTML support. We also import a number of other things. Suddenly I can't test anything anymore - not with a python test function or with the zope debugger, it seems. I get an error message that complains about the variable 'trueself' that was omitted from the request. So after this I can't test things anymore. I still need to make a creation form and a product installation method. In the tutorial it mentions the process of turning publishable product into product is a bit tedious and that in the future there will perhaps be a more streamlined process. I hope this future arrives soon, as after this, still without apparant ability to test, I need to add a producting editing form, a product editing method, define Zope permissions, management tabs, a meta type, and a product icon. The system gives no feedback on any of these. Then finally, I can install the poll and test it. This is too big a bound for me, somehow. I am able to do all the steps, but I keep getting bogged down, starting over, knowing I can't test anything yet. It breaks the quick Python development cycle; it's even slower than my C++ development cycle. There are too many steps that don't seem to fit into my short term memory. Part of the program design I do during prototyping. I can't seem to do this with products. A way to resolve this would be: * A lot more practice by me. I'm doing this. :) * A way to test each step somewhat better. Feedback from Zope telling you if you're still on the right course. * A more automated process of poll creation. I'm starting to think about what this should look like. I can probably eventually help with design/implementation, if I keep butting my head at product creation enough. * I'm missing something. "Martijn, when I create a product I do so and then so and it's really easy and quick." * products are beyond Martijn's feeble mind and he just should give up. :) I want to see more products for Zope. I want to *make* products for Zope. If it were easier somehow, there would be more products for Zope, which would be good for everybody. Enough of my lament. I hope it helps somebody else; otherwise ignore all as frustration relief. And again, I do like Zope. Regards, Martijn

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ANNOUNCE: Slashdot headlines External Method
by Amos Latteier 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

Everyone's doing it, why not you? I'm referring of course to displaying Slashdot headlines in a sidebar on your site. To help you fit in, I've slightly updated Andrew Kuchling's Slashdot headline display code to work easily with Zope. http://www.zope.org/Download/Contrib/slashdot.py It's an External Method that checks slashdot for updated headlines and stores them as attributes of a Folder. Then you can use DTML to display them any way you want. If you're looking for a simple (and useful ;-) External Method example, look no further. Have fun. -Amos P.S. Don't forget External Method documentation is available. http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Reference/ExternalMethods -- Amos Latteier mailto:amos@digicool.com Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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RE: [Zope] Better Memeory Management Feature Request
by Michel Pelletier 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

> -----Original Message----- > From: Scott Robertson [mailto:sroberts@codeit.com] > > What files report information under /proc? If you receive any > of these > scripts please pass them on to me. I think we will create a > few beta sites > for anybody interested on the list and then monitor their usage. > Mem info is in /proc/(pid)/stat but ps axm works pretty well... Here's my (amateur) contribution: script in the Zope/var directory: #!/bin/bash ps axm | grep $(cat < /usr/local/dc/zope19/var/pcgi.pid) | grep -v grep \ >> /usr/local/dc/zope19/var/rawdata crontab entry */5 * * * * /usr/local/dc/zope19/var/rawmem 2> /dev/null * 23 * * * /bin/date >> /usr/local/dc/zope19/var/rawdata 2> /dev/null This will dump the ps m for the zope process every five minutes, and timestamp it once a day. After a week or so we should have a pretty good set of datapoints. -Michel > --------------------------------------------------- > - Scott Robertson Phone: 714.972.2299 - > - CodeIt Computing Fax: 714.972.2399 - > - http://codeit.com - > --------------------------------------------------- >

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Re: [Zope] Zope on the Mac
by Jeffrey P Shell 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

> Actually, I've been thinking about how to make Python Carbon-based so it > runs on MacOS X (until then it's just not "ready for prime time"), and > which time this hsould be a lot easier :-) I can imagine the announce message now. "Python is now a carbon based lifeform" :) > There has been talk, however, of making Python OSA-aware so that it can > be used as THE scripting language on MacOS... but I've held off on doing > anything about this until I better understand the scripting architecture > of MacOS X---as there's talk that WebObjects will also plug in, which > might necessitate major changes. Isn't it already semi-OSA-aware? I've only dabbled lightly with the mac modules. I was just about to write a folder action to launch a Python script that uses ZPublisher.Client to publish a folder full of *.dtml files (a giant heinous form of death that i'm working on, neatly segmented into lots of li'l bitty pieces - too many to put up with cutting'n'pasting from Alpha all the time) to a Principia 1.8 beta (in desperate need of an upgrade). I want to make the script launch every time a file is saved and i'm pretty sure MacOS 8.5's Folder Actions would do the trick, but it seems a bit silly using a scripting language to launch a scripting language. Keeping it all in Python would be pretty nice. anyways, a Carbon based Zope would be nice. I imagine the POSIX layer of MacOS X Server would be an easier development, but the price tag of OS X Server and the fact that it currently comes with free WebObjects makes it a much smaller platform than Carbon can target. Of course, if I can get The Company to buy OS X Server for me to look into all of this, i won't complain ;). The main issue I see (which may be solved by ZServer...but maybe not, MacPython doesn't support threads :( even though threading is available on MacOS - in limited form at least) is Web Server support. If ZServer or ZopeHTTPServer is used, it's no problem. But the Web Servers i've dabbled with (Microsofts Personal Web Server, Apples Web Sharing) use much different environment/request variables than Unix or even NT. .jPS | jeffrey(a)digicool.com | http://www.zope.org/

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RE: [Zope] Better Memeory Management Feature Request
by Michel Pelletier 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

Scott Robertson wrote: > > You are very correct. That's why are first Zope Virtual > Hosting Machine > will have between .5GB-1GB of memory to start with. But it > only took me 5 > minutes to get the process to swell up to 18MB. That means some > industrious/mallicious user could conceivably swell theirs up to 100MB > even the full GB and then nobody else would get to play. > > Have you played with making the Cache Parameters in the Control Panel more agressive? -Michel > > --------------------------------------------------- > - Scott Robertson Phone: 714.972.2299 - > - CodeIt Computing Fax: 714.972.2399 - > - http://codeit.com - > --------------------------------------------------- > > > _______________________________________________ > Zope maillist - Zope(a)zope.org > http://www.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope >

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How to use the Scheduler
by Stefan Franke 11 Feb '99

11 Feb '99

Is there any documentation about the Scheduler classes? Can I use them for a regular call to an external method on a fixed position of the database? Stefan

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