May 2000 - Zope - Zope lists

Re: [Zope] using zope for broadcast e-mail messages...
by Anthony Baxter 23 Nov '00

23 Nov '00

>>> chas wrote > Zope's dtml-sendmail tag is excellent - it makes sending > e-mail a breeze. It reminds me of a similar tag that > Cold Fusion added and which I've noticed many sites use > for sending out customized newsletters (the "Allaire > ColdFusion Application Server" header being the giveaway). > > > Now, doing the same in Zope, I can loop over the user > profiles in our database to extract name, e-mail, and > even customize the content of the newsletter as follows : > > > <dtml-in ZSQL_Select_User_Profiles> > >  > To: <dtml-var firstname> <<dtml-var email>> > From: robot <robot(a)ourdomain.com> > Subject: <dtml-var random_inanity> > > Dear <dtml-var firstname>, > > blah blah content (also dependent on his/her likes/preferences) > >  > > </dtml-in> > > > Nothing groundbreaking so far. But the question then is : how > is this going to work if the user database numbers 200,000+ ? > It will take almost half a day to complete and this can't be > done in one form-submission or page load ! Why not use ZClient to make the request to do the mailout? It can just happily sit there for half a day (or whatever) chugging along, without screwing up if your browser goes away. Anthony -- Anthony Baxter <anthony(a)interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

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99.9% CPU usage (0.1% brain usage)
by Kevin Smith 26 Jun '00

26 Jun '00

Hi there, For some reason Zope would suddenly hang and it's thread would consume 99.9% of CPU usage. The first time this happened the problem magically disappeared after a complete reinstall. Here's what happened while casually throwing bannerexchange code into the default DTML document. standard_html_footer </td> </tr> </table> <dtml-var bannerexchange> </body> </html> bannerexchange <dtml-var standard_html_header> <h2><dtml-var title_or_id></h2> <p>  </p> <dtml-var standard_html_footer> <---- Oops! I'm on Zope 2.1.6, do future version prevent me from making accidental infinite loops like this? Kevin Smith BTW: I get exponentially more done with Zope every day. Thanks for Zope.

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WebObjects
by Jason Cunliffe 09 Jun '00

09 Jun '00

Hello Now that Apple has slashed the price of WebObjects from $50,000 to $700, I am very interested to hear any opinions/experiences of WebObjects.. how does it compare with Z*** , Man***, Rox**, ColdF***** etc http://www.apple.com/webobjects/ -What are the good ideas? -What is similar? -What is different? -How does WebObjects handle integration with various scripting languages: Python, Perl etc -What effect you think Apple's announcement wil have on webapp market and development? Thanks in advance for any feedback - Jason ________________________________________________________________ Jason CUNLIFFE = NOMADICS.(Interactive Art and Technology).Design Director

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Re: [Zope] Passing all POST variables?
by Martijn Pieters 07 Jun '00

07 Jun '00

[Keeping zope(a)zope.org in the loop for the archive] On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 02:05:42PM +0100, Steve Alexander wrote: > Martijn Pieters wrote: > > On Fri, May 26, 2000 at 11:05:23AM +0100, Steve Alexander wrote: > > > Here's a very silly idea: > > > > > > Could you pickle and Base64 encode the data you want to pass, and then > > > shove it in a single hidden control? > > > > I am afraid that is a very silly security hole. Anyone can replace that pickle > > with any other pickle, which the server will then instanciate. Anything goes. > > I *knew* there was some reason it was silly as I was typing it :-) > > Shame there's no "safe pickle option" that allows only numbers, strings, > lists, tuples and dictionaries. There is actually. It's called marshal: http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/module-marshal.html which supports just that list of types, plus code objects. -- 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 ---------------------------------------------

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syndication??
by Webmaster 06 Jun '00

06 Jun '00

A few weeks ago I went to an Allaire Spectra seminar (Spectra is Allaire's $15,000 Zope). It was a very nice presentation and the fundamental principles were quite similar. I have played around with Spectra and I found it to be super clunky with waaaaay to many steps from point A to point B. Not to mention the fact that it is only "object like". I could go on but this is not meant to be a comparison study. However, with that said, there was one particular "out-of-the-box" feature that really impressed me. In spectra you can take and "object" (article, image, etc) and set it up for syndication. One of the syndication options is to send the "object" via email at a set time. So you could have a news page summary set up to send itself out to a distribution email list on a certain day. The concept is simple enough, but I just don't know how I could do the same thing in Zope. I am setting up a system where daily articles can be entered weeks in advance and will only appear on the web site when the date matches their "go live date" (easy). But I would also like the article to be emailed to my distribution email list on its "go live date". Is anyone doing this? If so could you enlighten me on how? Thanks!! -Jamey

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A new development model for Zope?
by Paolo Bizzarri 06 Jun '00

06 Jun '00

Hi everybody, I was just wondering if Zope could not get a better development model. I will explain briefly. Currently, Zope seems to have a model for major releases, in which bugs are corrected and features (possibly large features) are added in each new release. This model, IMHO, performs poorly on the stability and bug fixing side. My proposal is that Zope should go through a stable/development version, in a similar way to the linux-kernel. New heavy features should be only for the development Zope, whereas the stable Zope should receive only the bugfixes and the (micro) new features. This should be of major importance, because I would like to have Zope to increase stability on normal versions, without any further feature that I do not need. What do you think about it ? Paolo -- Paolo Bizzarri - Responsabile Marketing I3 Icube Srl Sede: Via Ridolfi 15 - 56124 Pisa (PI), Italia E-mail: p.bizzarri(a)icube.it WWW: www.icube.it Tel: (+39) 050 97 02 07 Fax: (+39) 050 31 36 588

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Strange Zope behavior/Instability
by Rob Sporleder 06 Jun '00

06 Jun '00

For reasons unknown we lost http connectivity to our Zope server three times last night. I've checked the http logs and, as I suspected, didn't find anything unusual around the time we lost connectivity. The Python processes are still running and everything looks normal except for the connectivity problem. Does anybody have any idea what might be causing this? I haven't found anything. Here are some specifics about our setup... version of python: 1.5.2 operating system: Linux 2.2.12-20smp (Redhat 6.1) services running on machine: MySQL 2 instances of Zope Python machine specifics: CPU: 0.04 MEM: 31M of 512M Swap: 528688K free Disk Space: GB's available on all partitions Hardware: 598 Mhz Pentium III, 4 17.4 GB SCSI hard disks version of Zope: 2.1.4 Thanks, Rob

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Zope admin/backup question
by dillera＠isc.upenn.edu 06 Jun '00

06 Jun '00

Backing up Data.fs everynight--- is it in a usable state if it is backed up while Zope is running? I haven't actually tested the restored Data.fs yet, I wanted to get some feedback first. Also, are the Data.fs.in and Data.fs.lock files necessary for restore or 'moving' a Zope install? I have already just moved the Data.fs file over to a virgin Zope install and it seems to be working OK. -andy diller

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Re: [Zope] E-Commerce solution using Python and Zope.
by Terry Kerr 05 Jun '00

05 Jun '00

Graham Chiu wrote: > > > >these problems were fixed...it was only a problem initially caused by an > >upgrade. > > > > Hi, > > A couple of other things. On your front page, the non-hilighted 'demo' > image is broken. If you go to www.adroit.com there are more broken images. > You may not be seeing them if they're in your cache. > Also, your shopping cart is still broken. > > Try this > > 1. select an image and place into cart. > 2. go to check out > 3. don't enter any details and click on buy > 4. It then asks for credit card details - when it shouldn't really allow you > this far > 5. Then just keep backing out and the cart empties out :-( > > I downloaded the latest checkout but haven't had to a chance to see where > the bug is. > Ok...I found the bug that allows you to buy without entering any details I can fix it. Yes, after you have entered the checkout, you cannot back out. This was just overlooked...it will be fixed. > > Otherwise it looks quite good, though I would prefer a solution that uses a > relational database to save data. ( My own Zope Ecommerce site has about > 24,000 items which would be a bit painful to add items using a through the > web interface. ) > We didn't use a relational database because it is way too is too complex for the intended use of the product. The idea behind e-tailer was to have an ecommerce product which is extremely simple and quick to setup. Setting up a shop is as simple as adding an e-tailer from the manage screen of a folder. It takes less that 5 minutes to have the shop fully setup and ready to go and accepting secure credit information. I don't know of any other ecommerce products that are that easy to setup. Besides, there are no easy ways to manipulate an SQL backend like we do with the e-tailer catalog. Things like adding and remove product properties, and giving properties to categories that all the products within that category will aquire, and having products and categories aquiring template styles, etc. This is all very difficult if not impossible to acheive with a flat relational database. We never intended for e-tailer to hold 24000 items! Although i dont see any problem with this. We have done some tests with over 50000 cataloged items in a zodb and searching was fine. I agree that adding 24000 items through a web interface would be painful ;-) We need to create a tool that can upload items from other storages so that this kind of process can be speed up. Having said all that, we are looking at possibly integrating a backend relational database. Any more feedback is greatly appreciated! ;-) terry > > --- > Graham Chiu > http://www.compkarori.co.nz/index.php > http://www.compkarori.com/dynamo -- The HomeBuilt Dynamo > http://www.compkarori.com/dbase -- The dBase Bulletin > > ________________________________________________________________________ > Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com -- Terry Kerr (terry(a)adroit.net) Adroit Internet Solutions Pty Ltd (www.adroit.net) Phone: (03) 9563 4461 Fax: (03) 9563 3856 Mobile: 0414 938 124

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Proposal for mail-in to Zope
by Simon Coles 05 Jun '00

05 Jun '00

Hi, We (NIP - in the form of Chris Withers, Stephen Harrison, and Simon Coles) have put some thought into the question of how to get emails into Zope, and have come up with a design which we thought we'd pass by the list before we start doing something. The problem we are trying to solve is basically being to email "something(a)myserver.me.com" and that email ends up in the Zope ZODB processed in whatever way is appropriate. We aren't worried about sending email, that's done well at the moment. We also wanted to keep things as simple and quick as possible :-) This means trying to avoid getting involved with mail systems as much as we can. Most MTAs can be setup to pass an email to the stdin of a program. Sendmail will do this, and Exim (http://www.exim.org/) will also pay attention to what that program returns and queue the message for re-try later if it fails. So using Exim, we don't have to get into any messy stuff about queuing mails if the Zope server is down. Some alternatives we considered and didn't go for: - write something in Zope to listen for SMTP connections, effectively large portions of an MTA. This would be cool but painful. - pull mail from a POP or IMAP server. This had the downside that it introduced polling into the system (slow) and also required something to happen on a schedule, which doesn't happen in Zope yet. So: - Within Exim, use the "pipe" transport to get email for a particular host sent to a program on the standard input. If the program called returns certain codes then Exim will queue the message and try again. - This program takes the email message and puts it into Zope, probably by calling a DTML Method or something. This would probably be configured by objects in the Zope ZODB which say effectively "When you get email for this address, then call this Method". - The DTML Method is responsible for doing the right things to get the email message into the ZODB in whatever form is appropriate. We haven't yet figured out how to make sure the above mail handling program can find all the relevant configuration documents. Is there some way of efficiently finding all instances of a particular ZClass? (Chris W. still isn't sure that's how the configuration will work but that's the plan for the moment, so any thoughts would be appreciated) What we'll do is a first version that hard codes everything in the above script and prove the principle of the thing, and then move onto the configuration. Does this sound like what people need? Any thoughts, comments, warnings? I don't know yet what kind of schedule we'll be able to do this on but drop me a mail and when there's something to play with we'll let you know. Simon -- --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ---------- Simon J. Coles Email: simon(a)nipltd.com New Information Paradigms Work Phone: +44 1344 753703 http://www.nipltd.com/ Work Fax: +44 1344 753742 =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============

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