March 2000 - Zope - Zope lists

Multiple paths to same documents
by Flemming Funch 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

I'm new with Zope. One thing I'm looking for how to do is the effect that one document might virtually be stored in multiple folders. For example, if I keep a hierarchy of folders that is an archive of articles, maybe stored chronologically in a folder for each month or something like that. But then I also want those same articles to appear in other folder hierarchies, categorizing and organizing them in various ways. And I don't just want to put duplicates of the document in there. I'd like that if somebody updates the original, the virtual documents in the other folders update too. Is there some obvious DHTML statement or trick I don't know about yet? Or a Product that does something useful about this? Essentially I'm looking for an equivalent to symbolic or hard links to files in a Unix file system. - Flemming o / \------------------ Flemming A. Funch ------------------------- / * \ New Civilization Network / Synchronicity Networks / * * \ ffunch(a)worldtrans.org o-------o----------- http://www.worldtrans.org/ --------------------

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dynamically changing a tree icon?
by Shawn G 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

For example, a person is browsing a site that uses a dtml tree for navigation and I want to change the icon for the node to a different icon (say, that shows a checkmark) when they have visited the page (or interacted with it in some way). what would be the best way to do this? ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com

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Re: [Zope] I got it!
by addyd＠unk.edu 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

I'd be interested in what your epiphany was...what you were thinking Zope would do as opposed to your enlightened perspective? Putting that into words might help those of us still wandering about in a bit of a fog. Darren Addy University of Nebraska at Kearney

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DTML fmt for Hex
by Chui Tey 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

Hi, is there a dtml- fmt attribute to display numbers in hex? Chui

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Zope Newbie Question [ Variables? ]
by Luis Cortes 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

While trying to create the mail form example from the How To I created a property (I thought they where like global variables) with the same name as "comments", and the example failed to work. Once I removed the property, the example worked fine. Can someone explain why? Are properties like global variables? Can you change their values? mail form example ...  <H2>We want your input!</H2> <form action="SendFeedback" method="post"> Your Name: <input type="text" name="name" size="40"> <br> <textarea name="comments" rows="10" cols="50"> Type your comments here. </textarea><br> <input type="submit" value="Send Feedback"> </form>  ... sendFeedback ...   To: Feedback Recipient <form_recipient(a)example.com> From: Zope Feedback Form <zope_form(a)example.com> Subject: Feedback from the web Feedback from :  Comments:   <h1>Thank you for your input!</h1> <p>Your comments have been sent.</p>

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RE: [Zope] Zope needs this (and Dynamo has it)
by Alexander Staubo 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

> From: M. Adam Kendall [mailto:mak@kha0s.org] > Sent: Friday, March 03, 2000 5:48 PM > To: Alexander Staubo > Cc: Zope Mailing List (E-mail) > Subject: RE: [Zope] Zope needs this (and Dynamo has it) > > > > On 03-Mar-2000 Alexander Staubo wrote: > > are possibly evil, but the product is of high quality, and > it sells. And > > because it sells, many people use it, and because so many > people use it, > > skilled developers exist in large numbers. Unfortunately, I > can't say > > the same of Zope. > > Funny, I had never heard of Dynamo before you mentioned it here. > Fortunately, I can't say the same of Zope ;) The reason you have not heard of Dynamo is that Dynamo isn't being hyped; Zope is. There are other, non-Zope solutions out there, some of them quite solid. I like to keep an open mind, and so should you. There are, indeed, quite a number of people who have heard of Dynamo but never heard of Zope. While my statistical data is entirely non-existent, I'll wager that Dynamo-awareness exceeds Zope-awareness by a factor of at least two. ;-) This isn't necessarily something to get upset about, and anyway I believe, and hope, that the difference is shrinking. >I think you underestimate > the actual numbers of people and sites that use Zope. I also > think that > you are creating FUD so that you can get a feature you want to see > implemented by the folks at DC. Truly bad taste. Just a bit of background since you're accusing me of FUD. Dynamo drives many of the web's most popular sites, and is in direct competition with Zope, sharing the application server space with contenders such as SilverStream, Sybase, Vignette, Jade, and many others. Along with Vignette, Dynamo is one of the most successfully and widely employed app servers solutions in existence. Whether this is a good or a bad thing I'll leave for you to decide; I don't like Dynamo, but I acknowledge its technical edge on Zope (and other solutions) in several areas, such as clustering, reporting, personalization services, e-commerce services, stability, and raw speed. As an artifact of Dynamo's platform of choice -- Java -- there is indirectly a "virtually limitless" expertise on Dynamo. If you know your Java and your Enterprise JavaBeans, you already know Dynamo, and stepping into your Dynamo shoes will be easy. Compare that to stepping into Zope's multiple zens: acquisition, DTML, objects, Python. Note that I'm not arguing against Zope here, which has a self-inflicted and justified learning curve. However, managers will not necessarily respect this difference in philosophy: The cost of training a person in the arts of Zope will be measured against the cost of hiring an already-trained Java wizzkid, and -- at least right now, today -- Zope will lose. This situation has nothing to do with open vs. closed, either. Just like Zope we're talking about proprietary (as opposed to standarized -- DTML may be open, but it's still proprietary) technology. The fact that Java is more widely established, and evolving faster, than Python is unfortunate and outright infuriating, but right now that's how the cards are dealt. Dynamo also costs a lot of money. For small businesses, it costs too much. A heavy-duty support contract with Digital Creations also costs a lot of money, but you have a choice. On top of that, Dynamo is open-ended but not open -- there is no source distribution. My point? Zope already has a foothold in the small-time web site segment of the market. However, big people wield big swords, and Zope, despite its many powerful features, is not big enough for truly big things. This is a two-part problem. The first part is that Zope's bullshit factor is too low; it's not flashy enough to convince a senior manager that Zope has enough clout for their business. It's a purely aesthetical apprecation of Zope's poor-man, open-source philosophy, and the fact that Zope does not offer a comprehensive monitoring system with a ticker bar providing useless but impressive information does not fare well with those who like to be bullshitted. We tech people know better, we know a shiny surface tells us nothing about the engine underneath, but we tech people are not holding the crucial component -- those big brown bags of money. Now, the second part of the problem is that underneath Zope's lacklustre but entirely deceptive surface lies a powerful engine with scalability problems. So far the only way to scale properly with Zope is a combination of a load-balancing clustering system (eg., TurboLinux' TurboCluster Server, which I can personally vouch for -- brilliant stuff -- or Linux Virtual Server) with Digital Creations' ZEO, of which I've only read about. There are Zope sites out there that are suffering scalability problems (I won't mention specifics, other than that the project I'm involved in is one of them). The problem is real, and intrinsically related to Python. I wish I fix Python rather than sit still and bitch about it; I periodically express my dissatisfaction with Python's lack of performance, and I have certain ideas as to how to improve it, but a research project like this would take time, of which I can currently allot none. So instead I just bitch. ;-) Finally, as for DTML being proprietary, Zope desperately needs native support for XSL/XSLT as an alternative transformation language. I think it was Michel who spoke vaguely of this being considered incorporated into a future version of Zope. (At one point I planned doing an XSL product, but I have not yet had a project to fund it with. So I'm not just bitching here.) We also need better in-line scripting capabilities than currently offered with External Methods and PythonMethods. This to fight the creeping and ever-expanding notion that Java (replacing Smalltalk) is the chosen, possibly even pre-destined, language for app servers and middleware. Try to find an OODBMS, RDBMS, or application server nowadays that does not use, or plan to use, Java as its fundamental extension mechanism. I can think of a few, but they're few. If you want to talk about FUD, you've got it right there. Anyway, just my two cents. > > Speaking of which, SNMP support for Zope would have been > nice. Then we > > could import the numbers needed to build monitors like the > one featured > > in the screen shot. > > Please no. There is NO reason to pollute Zope with something > as insecure > as SNMP. Then please offer us an alternative, open, standarized interface to monitoring data. The fact that SNMP in itself is insecure has little, if anything, to do with whether Zope should be "polluted" with such support. An alternate route might be to have Zope export necessary variables through a well-defined XML DTD, and then provide the necessary tools to convert this XML output to SNMP, although supporting SNMP traps this way would be difficult. Perhaps supporting Performance Co-Pilot (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/pcp/) would suit you better. Unfortunately, PCP is probably not -- at least not now -- portable to Windows NT. In fact, I'm not sure whether PCP will exist outside IRIX and Linux for some time yet. As far as pollution goes, assuming Zope exports the appropriate data -- in whatever form -- then support for performance/monitoring/management APIs such as SNMP, PCP, WBEM, and to a lesser extent PDH, aren't difficult to isolate into add-on products. -- Alexander Staubo http://alex.mop.no/ "Do not go gentle into that good night/old age should rave and burn against the close of day/Rage, rage against the dying of the light." --Dylan Thomas

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Re: [Zope-dev] ZCatalog: Forgot to mention
by Jason Spisak 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

Thanks for the correction/clearification. All my best, Martijn Pieters writes: > From: "Jason Spisak" <444(a)hiretechs.com> > > Tom, > > > > Michel can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I believe only properties > > get indexed in the Catalog. YOu can also only retuen properties as > > meta_data. If you want the value of a given method that comes up fora > > Catalog result, you do this: > > > > <dtml-in "Catalog.searchResults(title='foo')"> > > <dtml-with "resolve_url(getpath(data_record_id_),REQUEST)"> > > <dtml-var getParentEx> > > </dtml-with> > > </dtml-in> > > > > This will return the value of getParentEx method for the record > > returned. > > You can catalog mthod results as well. But as catalog won't pass in any > parameters, you cannot use DTML Methods or Documents. Use an External Method > or Python Method instead. > > Martijn Pieters > | Software Engineer mailto:mj@digicool.com > | Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com/ > | Creators of Zope http://www.zope.org/ > | The Open Source Web Application Server > --------------------------------------------- > Jason Spisak CIO HireTechs.com 6151 West Century Boulevard Suite 900 Los Angeles, CA 90045 P. 310.665.3444 F. 310.665.3544 Under US Code Title 47, Sec.227(b)(1)(C), Sec.227(a)(2)(B) This email address may not be added to any commercial mail list with out my permission. Violation of my privacy with advertising or SPAM will result in a suit for a MINIMUM of $500 damages/incident, $1500 for repeats.

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Documentation survey
by John Morton 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

As the tiny little text box on the survey page isn't up to long dissertations, I'll post my comments here: The guides need better examples and blank spots filled in, in general. The DTML guide, in particular, needs a canonical explanation of the quoting rules and shortcuts so new DTML hackers understand why you can get away with this: <dtml-let foo=bar> ... </dtml-let> But still need to do this: <dtml-let foo="'constant'"> ... </dtml-let> There is still a lot of docs using the old, ugly HTML comment style tags, too, which is confusing, and there are a lot of examples of using '_' and REQUEST to kludge up a temporary namespace when <dtml-let> is the accepted means to kludge up a namespace[1]. The HOWTOs and Tips are potentially the basis of an excellent Zope cookbook, but they require more stewardship from DC: - They need more structure. Catagorizations like 'Authenication/Authorization', 'Using RDBMSs' and 'DTML tricks' would save a lot of search time and provide hints towards missing documentation. - The need to be vetted. There are a lot of docs with incorrect examples and obsolete information that need to be tidied up. John [1] Who the hell came up with a scoped assignment tag?! Why not implement a <dtml-set> tag that isn't a container and that assigned to a temporary namespace that persists for the duration of a DTML objects rendering. It can have a special attribute that you use to commit changes made to an object in the temporary space back to it's persistent name space, and you'd have a decent assignment tag.

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Use of HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE in Zope
by Sin Hang Kin 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

I am making a new head zope index_html file, I think it is now about time to make use of the HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE which is sent by the browser to indicate the perferred language. The variable is a string like: lang1, lang2;q=p1,lang3;q=p2.... while lang1, lang2, lang3 is the perferenced languages. I have think of the following ways to make such brenches in zope: 1. by setting the lang variable in the REQUEST 2. by transfer to the brench of lang/ 3. brench calls of index_lang What will be the perferred way to make such a brench? I want to hear from all. In building the brench code : I have come up with the code: <dtml-in "_.string.split(HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE, ',')"> .....do thing according to sequence-item </dtml-in> but on the second argument, the sequence-item may contain ;q=0.5 which need to be trancated. How can I trancated that in dtml? Rgs, Kent Sin

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WorldPilot ftp server available for all (was: Re: Re: [Zope] worldpilot 1.0?)
by WorldPilot Helpers 09 Mar '00

09 Mar '00

> Note to list: > > I have responded to this request. I will see if I can find some ftp space to > "mirror" the current worldpilot version. Can I do this from zope.org? Ryan to > you have any problems with this? Thanks, The problem is fixed. The box with the ftp server had PARANOID host deny settings. This caused user's with incorrect reverse IP lookup nameserver settings to be disconnected. Sorry :-( You should all be able to download now (but maybe get in touch with your domain administrator/ISP and get your DNS entries corrected, if you previously had trouble ;-) Cheers, Ryan > > On Wed, 08 Mar 2000, Monty Taylor wrote: > > >%_I've had the same problem. I contacted the support people who offered to > > email it to me, but I haven't heard back. I would also appreciate it if > > someone would drop a copy in a reachable location or email it. > > > > Thanks alot! > > Monty > > > > ethan mindlace fremen wrote: > > > > > > Zopistas, > > > > > > I'd really like to give worldpilot a spin, but the FTP site seems to be > > > AWOL. Could someone be so kind as to drop me a copy or let me know > > > where I could find it? > > > > > > Thanks, > > > > > > -- > > > ethan fremen - mindlace(a)imeme.net > > > good design is as close as I want to get to ideology. > > > > > > _______________________________________________ > > > Zope maillist - Zope(a)zope.org > > > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope > > > ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** > > > (Related lists - > > > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce > > > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ) > -- > Jack Ungerleider > The Ungerleider Group > Creative Solutions for Cooperative Computing > jack(a)jacku.com > www.jacku.com > > _______________________________________________ > Zope maillist - Zope(a)zope.org > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope > ** No cross posts or HTML encoding! ** > (Related lists - > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce > http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev ) > > --------------------------------------------------- WorldPilot Get Synched - http://www.worldpilot.org The Open Source Personal Information Manager Server Powered by Python and Zope - http://www.zope.org

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