February 2000 - Zope

Re: [Zope] comment on posting behavior
by J C Lawrence 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

I dislike being an apologist for any product. I apologise for that aspect of what follows. On Sat, 26 Feb 2000 19:28:28 -0500 Guy N Hurst <gnhurst(a)hurstlinks.com> wrote: > This is only to underscore the fact that Zope is not ready for > prime time. It goes beyond just posting untested results. No, it indicates that the Zope community, and its accumulated wisdom is yet young, which is a rather different thing from readiness or physical capability for "prime time". This does not state that Zope is ready or not for "prime time" (I'm not fit to make that call), it just doesn't apply to the question. A implies B does not mean that B implies A. > Something like Perl or PHP would have definitive, known answers > for most all issues. Which is a fact due to a well established and articulate user population more than anything else. Zope could be the best thing since sliced bread or your choice of &diety; on high, yet suffer as it is suffering, without a skilled and articulate user population. > MY OPINION The problem with Zope is, hardly anyone seems to know > what is really going on under the hood (but hey, you're not > supposed to need to know), and it is too often that it is left to > anyone's guess why something doesn't work - or even why it in fact > does work a certain way. Which is why the source is available: you can find out for yourself. The assertion that "you're not supposed to need to know" is not supportable, and is I suspect, a FUD-like red herring imported from other fields. Zope has the rather unusual property that it was written in the same language that is used internally for extensions, and that such extentions are expected and intended to directly and intimately integrate with and extend Zope itself. (One could argue that this is a failure in product definition deliniation, as well as argue that this is one of Zope's strengthas as an ___object___ publishing system. but that's something for another argument). > No one is certified... Praise be. > ...and no one claims to be, either. A small and wonderful mercy. > whereas Perens' site had almost no graphics... Serving graphics from Zope is patently silly. Serving graphics from any large general purpose server (eg Apache) is patently silly for active sites. Static content should be, and needs to be, served by small, fast, light weight single-purpose servers ala thttpd. Its just not worth devoting a near-Meg process image executable to shoving a 1K JPEG down a wire. > ...and FAST CGI isn't supported on NT for free. NT is a choice. Like any choice, it has implications. You either buy the implications with the choice, or you make a different choice. Don't like the trade-offs? Sorry. Life is tough and often unfair. I'm not aware that Life, or Zope, promised to be fair in this regard. If you want to use NT, that's your choice, and not one I'm in a position to discuss (happily MS free for almost 8 years now). Ther are many trade-offs in making the NT choice. Apparently FCGI is one of them. > Comments? Is anyone else fed up? I have not mastered Zope. I have not mastered Python tho I have written a few hundred thousand lines of Python in recent years. Zope's learning curve is near vertical. Zope does not appear to either be, or to present itself as a general purpose hand-holding user-protecting RAD web publishing or web scripting system. It is presented as an OBJECT PUBLISHING SYSTEM, which is a rather different thing, and is a thing which directly implies that you are, at some point, going to need to apply Object Oriented Design (OOD) principles to its application. I make my living as a C/C++ programmer and am reasonably familiar with OOD. I'm aware that OOD requires discipline and good design skills to either apply well or to reap the benefits of, and that given those abilities, well applied, that the benefits are present and can be significant. Ergo, Zope, as an object publishing system suggests that by applying the same disciplines I use elsewhere in OOD, I can gain similar benefits for Zope's problem spaces. I haven't seen any sign that this isn't true. (This doesn't mean however that I am unconcerned however at the lack of abstraction between user-code and Zope internal code, tho that "fault" can be laid mostly at Python's lack of an internal security model). Mostly I've seen ways that actively suggest and imply tht this si true and can be relied upon to be true. As always, this is perception, and YMMV. Lastly, I trust the opinions of those who have mastered a particular skill, or who have at least shown good competence there. I do this deliberately on the basis that they have demonstrated that they actually understand the topic in question and therefore have a reasonable chance of actually being able to judge it on its flaws and merits. Its a lot harder to value the judgements of one who has stated that they have failed to either understand or apply the material they are now judging. The fact that you are (near) universally condemming of Zope, rather than stating both strengths and weaknesses, areas in which it does well and ones in which you adjudge it falls short as all systems have good and bad points, further supports the view that your view is tunnelled, single-sided, and likely unfair to both parties. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Re: [Zope] comment on posting behavior
by J C Lawrence 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

On Fri, 25 Feb 2000 18:23:40 -0500 Guy N Hurst <gnhurst(a)hurstlinks.com> wrote: > Tom Neff wrote: >> ... I strongly urge David and others not to post untested >> guesses as answers to specific technical questions here - it has >> the potential to confuse hundreds of readers. ... > I second this call!! Strongly disagreed. I would much rather have "likely to be correct" answers posted to the list than no answers posted at all. If some level of confusion is the result of that, so be it. I'm sure the confused (of which I'm often one) can learn to ignore the "I haven't tested this" posts if they really need to. -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Fourth request for help - Win2K+Zope
by Michael Simcich 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

I wonder what it takes to get some assistance with this issue? I have to assume that none of my peer Zope users out there knows what to do with my problem (Zope doesn't run under Windows 2000 as detailed in previous posts). So what do you all recommend that I try next? As far as I know this list is about it for peer level support so is my only alternative to see if DC is willing to enter into the smallest support contract ever seen? Sorry for the repetitive posts, but I need to get this thing working. Unless someone can point me to a better platform <g>. I am just really disappointed and frustrated with the lack of assistance and... a working copy of Zope. Michael Simcich AccessTools

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RE: [Zope] dtml-in appears to do a dtml-with, how to stop it?
by Kevin Meinert 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 >> Just try my heirarchy out (it's below). It should make more sense >> then. > >Yep, I did and I could reproduce your __call__ error. Using quotes >in the <dtml-with "someOtherFolder"> prevents this error. Hmmm. That's interesting, the ""'s worked. What's the difference between "" and not? I thought ""'s were only usefull when you had an expression with a space or some other delimiter character in it. (if you can point me to the docs that describe it, I can learn even more. :) Anyway, my problem is solved now :) To summerize what I can do now: I now have a "Poll" in my squishdot page. It's automatically added to the page just by dropping a method into the "rightbox_methods" folder, which includes the "Poll"/index_html (with Poll now in ""'s). Didn't work without the ""'s before. Thanks for the help, Kevin -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.2 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBOLiCvzlszdAdzf4MEQKFSACg2QmrRy5uO5z1kXJDlqjxTi5IwOMAn3jH owVHYiXsv13QWosszrRmD38E =zAQy -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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CSS within a Zope site
by Stephen Pitts 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

I've designed a site with Zope (http://www.centralchurchyouth.org) and I uses CSS pretty extensively (as much as I can get away with so that it still renders OK under Netscape 4.x). Right now, pages are generated more or less under the following framework: html_header - includes html, head, body, and table start tags a_page (hypothetical) - contains actual data html_footer - includes page footer with modification date, then closes all necessary tags What if a_page wants to define custom CSS classes? Since the <head> attribute is fully defined in html_header, I can't just shove a <style> block at the top of a_page. Also, an appropriate @import command would need to be added so the page grabs CSS info from the site-wide stylesheet. I don't want to pollute the global stylesheet with a style only used on one page either, so what can I do? Has anyone encountered this problem before or does anyone have an idea as to how I can solve it? -- Stephen Pitts smpitts(a)midsouth.rr.com

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Passing variables to External Method
by Mike 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

Hi All ! Just wondering how to pass a couple of values (username and password) to an external method. For simplicity at this stage I was just wanting to use string literals. My External method is called popmail. It seemed like I wanted to do something like <dtml-var popmail("fred","12343")> but it doesn't seem to work Could you please email me as well as returning to the list -- I don't want to miss a response ! Thanks in advance Mike

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dtml-in appears to mess up the "space"
by Kevin Meinert 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hello! I think my question was a little too complex before. I've simplified it. How does dtml-in change the current "space" set by dtml-width. It appears that it does, please see my example below. Hopefully this is something easy/familiar to you. ========================= I have this hierarchy: ========================= - - root + squishdot - index_html + somefolder + someOtherFolder - somemethod ========================= This code works: (code is in root/squishdot/index_html) ========================= <dtml-with somefolder> <dtml-with someOtherFolder> <dtml-var somemethod> </dtml-with> </dtml-with> ========================= But this code doesn't: ========================= <dtml-with somefolder> <dtml-in "objectValues(['DTML Method'])"> <dtml-with someOtherFolder> <dtml-var somemethod> </dtml-with> </dtml-in> </dtml-with> ========================= I get this error from my Zope server, on the one that doesn't work. ========================= Error Type: AttributeError Error Value: __call__ I read in the manual that dtml-in changes some variables, but I can't figure out how to get around it, and I can't find anything in the manual. (FYI: I did RTFM) I appreciate any insight, Kevin Meinert -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.2 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBOLg/nDlszdAdzf4MEQIahgCfVea1oh3UBxSSEYAMPFI1aXZ8TtkAniQM pfBRToHPEEM35K1fyTQ14GH0 =9vwM -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Character Swapping / Mapping
by Jatwood＠bwanazulia.com 27 Feb '00

27 Feb '00

I have an URL coming out of a database like "http://www.myplace.com" and need to pass it to another website but they want it in the format of "http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Emyplace%2Ecom". Is there a simple method to do this with or some sort of VAR tag? If not, what is the find and replace tag? Thanks, JMA

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memberships
by Kyle Burnett 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

can anyone point me to some docs on creating/maintaining membership? thanks in advance, kyle

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Re: Re: export Z_DEBUG_MODE=no -- broken?
by Andrey V Khavryutchenko 26 Feb '00

26 Feb '00

Hi, Martijn! >>>>> "MP" == Martijn Pieters writes: From> Martijn Pieters [mailto:mj@digicool.com] >> Indeed, this is caused by the fact you closed STDOUT and STDERR on the >> process. I would expect not to have this error when both stdout and stderr are redirected to file. >> In stead of the -D, you can start Zope up with >> >> z2.py [options] Z_DEBUG_MODE=1 >> >> where [options] is your current list of options used minus the -D flag. >> Zope then will behave demonic again (run nohup) and you'll only miss >> out on extra log messages from ZServer. MP> Harumph. I should've checked better before sending. ZDaemon will _not_ MP> fork when it encounters the Z_DEBUG_MODE flag set. MP> However, setting the BOBO_DEBUG_MODE flag to 1 will work. Internally, MP> BOBO_DEBUG_MODE is the old name for Z_DEBUG_MODE, and it still works MP> as well. However, the newer fork and watchdog daemon will not look for MP> it. Also, the log will not be echoed to STDERR (which it would in all MP> cases with Z_DEBUG_MODE set). Okay, that helps Thanks! MP> Tracebacks in error messages will be wrapped in <PRE></PRE>, not  Exactly what I was looking for. -- SY, Andrey V Khavryutchenko http://www.kbi.kiev.ua/~akhavr Software & SPI Engineer Visit my site Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.

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