November 2000 - Zope

Zope declining?
by Hung Jung Lu 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Hi, >From the mailing list volume in the last 3 months, it is not hard to see that there is a steady decline. This compared to the trend of last two years (doubling volume every year), should probably raise a red flag. I know what many would say: there are now more experts than newbies as compared to before. There are not as many problems as before, etc. But that is that really all? I don't think so. regards, Hung Jung _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.

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[ANNOUNCE] New Minimal product How-To
by Max M 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Hi I have just added this Product How-To: http://www.zope.org/Members/maxm/HowTo/minimal_01/index_html I would very much like some feedback as to whether this type of How-To is worth the effort. I wrote it because I would have liked something like this myself when I started. So should I write more like this, or is it a waste of time? Introduction text: 'Zope product programming has gotten a reputation as being difficult. This is not true. I belive that It's simply because the examples that has been shown, like the Boring class, has been too full featured. Furthermore the samples have skipped several steps when explaining the functionality, making "the Zope" way seem long and a bothersome. With all kinds of unnessecary extra code that is added "just because". I remember reading the Boring examples the first time thinking that there was all this deep black magic about Zope that no one really understood, but just did because the had seen it elsewhere. Therefore I have choosen to write a series of How-To's explaining in the simplest possible way how to program Zope. The pace will be VERY slow and every line of code will be explained in detail. If there is ANYTHING that is unclear please tell me about it. (Use the " Feedback to this page's author" link in the bottom of this page.)' Max M. W. Rasmussen, Denmark. New Media Director private: maxmcorp(a)worldonline.dk work: maxm(a)normik.dk ----------------------------------------------------- Specialization is for insects. - Robert A. Heinlein

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Higher Educatoin Portal/Admin
by Dario Lopez-K�sten 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Greetings! I'd like to know if there are any activities regarding use of Zope to build/support educational systems. I have searched the list and there seem to be a few, but I cannot find out how to contact the peoiple involved. My main interest lies in building administrative systems that ease the task of planning and administering courses, staff and student info, schedules, publishing info about courses, events, etc, as well building or supporting systems that will let teachers build and integrate on-line courses with existing admin systems (although this is secondary; there are better systems that do this allready). This is not an easy task, of course, because it involves a lot of analysing the needs of an educational organisation as well as reviewing how the organisation works, how the students preceivethe service the receive, etc, etc. In other words, a lot of process development, instead of "technical" development. I am currently heavily involved in such a project. Among other things, I'd like to have a serious discussion on the pros and cons of building such a site/portal/whatever with Zope and why it is better to choose Zope, instead of, say, Turbine in a combination with Jetspeed, which much more "buzzword" (read Java) compliant. The recent instabilities and slow response times experienced with the zope.org site and the incomplete, possibly unstable, state of DCOracle, the Oracle adapter (and similar concerns with some other needed Zope Products) has been raising some questions of the suitability of Zope for this kind of project. On the other hand, I fail to see an alternative to Zope; of course there are better CMS'es, better development platforms, better Oracle support elsewhere, and so on, but neither of those systems has the combination of integrated features and modularity of Zope. I am very interested in talking, even building a Zope SIG, with more people that interested in these issues. The traffic on the main Zope list is too heavy, and I feel this issue is better of maintained in a parallel list. I also would like to know if there is interest from Digital Creations in this matter. What do you people think? Feed(back) me! :) Sincerely, /dario - -------------------------------------------------------------------- Dario Lopez-Kästen Systems Developer Chalmers Univ. of Technology dario(a)ita.chalmers.se ICQ will yield no hits IT Systems & Services

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FIX for the infamous "__call__" bug - testers needed!
by Brian Lloyd 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Hi all - One of the things I _really_ _really_ wanted to fix for the upcoming 2.2.3 release is the infamous "__call__" bug. I have a fix that works according to my limited testing - what I really need is for a few volunteers familiar with the problem to take a few minutes to verify the fix and let me know if the problem goes away for them as well. Attached is an updated version of cDocumentTemplate.c. You can drop this into the lib/python/DocumentTemplate directory of your installation and rebuild it - after restarting the Zope site, the __call__ problem should be gone. I'd really like to hear from some folks on this so I can get the 2.2.3 release wrapped up - thanks! Brian Lloyd brian(a)digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com

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strange error on first load of zope page
by Toby Sargeant 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

The first page I try and load after restarting the zserver invariably contains the following error. It always occurs *after* the page has successfully been rendered (I have added debugging so that I can see the path traversal, and SQL statements executed). Hitting reload will then display the page properly, and I won't see the error again until i restart the server. (The actual text from the html source is 'Cannot pickle <type 'module'> objects') It seems perfectly reasonable to me that you can't pickle a module, but what I'm having trouble understanding is why zope is trying to. Can anyone suggest a way that I could try and track down why this is happening? thanks, toby. =============================================================================== Zope has encountered an error while publishing this resource. Error Type: UnpickleableError Error Value: Cannot pickle objects ... Traceback (innermost last): File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 222, in publish_module File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 187, in publish File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 221, in zpublisher_exception_hook (Object: proj) File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 175, in publish File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 235, in commit File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/ZODB/Transaction.py, line 251, in commit File /export/home/toby/zope/Zope2/lib/python/ZODB/Connection.py, line 349, in commit (Info: (('Products.ExternalMethod.ExternalMethod', 'ExternalMethod'), '\000\000\000\000\000\000\032 ', '')) UnpickleableError: (see above) -- [ Toby Sargeant : Inpharmatica : Developer : t.sargeant(a)inpharmatica.co.uk ] [ http://www.inpharmatica.co.uk : 020 7631 4644 fax 020 7631 4844 ]

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Building dynamically class instances using external methods.
by Hannes Grund 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Question: I am running Zope2.2.2 under python1.5.2 on a linux machine. The following situation: I have an external Method which creates dynamically an instance from of a class depending on some input to a function contained in this method. In short the code (of the external method) class Classname: def function1 def function2 ..etc. def createInstance(argument) x = Classname(argument) return x Where createinstance is the method that is invoked initially from zope. Everything works fine, the method returns something like <?.Classname instance at 8546e70> using "__allow_access_to_unprotected_subobjects__ = 1" in the class definition it is possible to access all methods of the class within Zope. Among others the class holds a method 'dump' who should 'pickle' the objects instance (using the python 'pickle' module), more precise should return a string represantion of itself. This works fine when tested in a normal python session. (where the method returns contrary to above: <__main__.Classname instance at .......>) Called from Zope this does not work. The pickle module raises an error: .......... File /usr/lib/python1.5/pickle.py, line 818, in dump File /usr/lib/python1.5/pickle.py, line 97, in dump File /usr/lib/python1.5/pickle.py, line 198, in save File /usr/lib/python1.5/pickle.py, line 400, in save_inst Error type: Attribute error, Error Value: __module__ QUESTION: Is there any possibility to get these things work. ? (or is it really awkward stuff ???) Maybe related questions: QUESTION 2: What does the "?" mark in the generated objects string representation means ? Is it neccessary to 'anchor' (sorry for my terminology) the object within some other object ? And: QUESTION 3: The lifetime of an instance has should not to be longer than the current REQUEST is performed, is there any possibility to create the instance as an subobject of the current REQUEST ?? Any help and advice would be highly appreciated... regards Hannes.

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Sybase (again?)
by Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Well, After no one else answered my last email about zope, I've decided to summarize what's going on with the ZSybaseDA so as to see if someone takes interest. STORED PROCEDURES DO NOT WORK. Anything else, however, does. Once a stored procedure was called, the db object is blocked till zope restarts. Any patches, solutions, suggestions? Manuel

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Advanced search in Zcatalog...
by daniel dias 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Hi! I´m trying to discover how to make a ZCatalog perform queries on several "fields" (as in the property sheets) of the cataloged objects, but with no sucess. I´d like to execute queries using a "or" chain of tokens, to be applied on several fields of the cataloged objects, given that each field has a priority in the search results. Any ideas on how to implement this? I´ve tried several approaches with absolutely no sucess, and I´m pretty stuck, so any help will be welcome. Thanks, Daniel Dias ________________________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Crie o seu e-mail grátis do Yahoo! Mail com 6 Megabytes livres! http://mail.yahoo.com.br

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RE: [Zope] Can I run Zope with i-Planet?
by Thiebaut CHAMPENIER 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

Hi, I did it when its name was still Netscape Enterprise server, so I suppose it should not be too big a problem. I can't remember how to do that... you have to use FastCgi I believe. -----Original Message----- From: Plaza Diez, Antonio To: 'zope(a)zope.org' Sent: 11/13/00 8:49 AM Subject: [Zope] Can I run Zope with i-Planet? - Can I run Zope with i-Planet Web Server? - How can I do this? -Where can I found some Documentation about it?

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Test - Is both the maillist and www.zope.org down?
by Max Møller Rasmussen 13 Nov '00

13 Nov '00

???

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