April 2001 - Zope - Zope lists

Re: [Zope] Zope in academic/educational/scientific environments (important)
by Joe Nicholls 09 Apr '01

09 Apr '01

Forgive me, a long post Im afraid, but I dont get the opportunity to reply on this list to something I know a little about. I could have just sent this to Henny, but hopefully it will be of interest to others. The Learning Technology group at the University of Wales College of Medicine (UWCM) has been developing with Zope since early 1999. I work with Phil Harris the principal Zope aficionado amongst us. I sit between him and the rest of the College. So, I know less about Zope and more about the organisational / educational issues. We're in exactly the same position as yourself Henny. We've been fighting the battle for quite some time. However, I don't believe the basic argument/philosophy is tied up with any specific technology as such. There are two parts to your case - first, why you should design and develop in-house as opposed to acquiring an off-the-shelf (commercial) solution?; second, why you should use Zope as opposed to any other technology? my contribution is more on the former. Senior management and most educators for that matter still have a poor understanding of the potential role of technology in education. This is even worse when considering the complexities of delivering an all embracing online learning environment. A much more holistic strategic view is required that recognises the emergent functions and facilities of integrating across all institutional information systems library, administration, web site, and learning/teaching technologies. Somehow this has to be communicated to senior management, and that it will only be realised by developing in-house. An off-the-shelf product is unlikely to provide a good fit and will require an organisation to change similar to the arguments over CMSs. The case for designing and developing in-house is clear if the significance of coupling educational theory with technology development is recognised. Technology is not the problem, as Phil is fond of saying - *anything can be done it's just a matter of time* - that bit is under our control. People are the challenge - politics and change management are the real issues - in this respect evolution is better than revolution. But the impetus has ultimately got to be from the top down senior management must drive it forward. A key part of the problem is that there is still poor understanding of what constitutes a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) or Managed Learning Environment (MLE), or what it should do. The majority of commercial (and academic) offerings provide little more than packaged CMS/Groupware solutions. Although these are necessary pre-requisites to building an online environment for learning, theres not much inherently in CMS/Groupware that directly promotes learning they just provide some of the tools. >From senior managements perspective, the commercial option provides immediate gratification. Many organisations are feeling the pressure to *be seen to be doing*. By buying into a recognised brand, e.g., Blackboard or WebCT, the VLE/MLE requirement can be ticked off the list the question is, what then? A home grown approach probably wont initially deliver as much, or as quickly but it is more likely to tackle real needs. More attention should be given to longer term strategic planning, perhaps with emphasis on producing something that is distinctive and which sets the institution apart from those that are buying the commercial offerings. Management, for some reason, judge an in-house approach as being more risky than a commercial solution. Which is a little strange, given how competitive and volatile the market is in this area. There are no guarantees that any of these companies will be around in 3-5 years. We are already witnessing mergers and odd alliances between companies, e.g., SCT, Campus Pipeline and WebCT. Theres a much greater chance of long-term viability if open source and open standards are adopted the problem is communicating this to senior management who havent a clue about what this means! In our experience only concrete examples seem to have any impact. They need to see examples that are relevant and meaningful to their needs. An in-house approach does mean reliance on technical specialists. But this is no different to other areas of the organisation, e.g., network infrastructure and administrative systems. It is a false belief that there is greater dependence on technical experts for in-house development this ignores the fact that specialist maintenance/support will be required for any kind of solution (commercial or not). Labour costs probably dont work out much different either way. Commercial companies can only afford to engineer a common denominator they have to try and keep all their customers satisfied. Tailored development to meet specific needs will only be done on a consultancy basis. The turn-around time for innovation will be much quicker if done in-house. Long term consultancy will prove costly (why not invest this internally?). Dangerously, institutions who go down this route will become increasingly dependent on the third party for what is their principal business - *education*. In addition, will there be an easy get out which allows transfer to alternative solution? Innovation in learning technologies is more likely to occur when technologists work day-to-day with learners and teachers in real settings. Youre also more likely to build something that meets the needs of your institution. Whatever solution is chosen establishing OWNERSHIP and CONTROL is crucial! i.e., complete access to source and the freedom to do what you want with it. But this wont be any good unless development is driven by educational need and that depends on having teams of technologist working with educators In my opinion, that should be THE strong argument for in-house development. Another advantage of the in-house approach is that the basic CMS/Groupware functionality is just as applicable to research and administration. Much of what is engineered for educational purposes is applicable elsewhere in the organisation there must be cost savings there somewhere! Thats where we ve directed much of our initial development effort - producing generic and transferable solutions, e.g., MS Word document upload and on-the-fly conversion to XML then HTML/PDF We thought management/administration would jump up and down over this, but theyve been slow to capitalise on it. More eyes might light up when its combined with a through-the-browser XML editor. After working with Zope for over 2 years, we are more than convinced it is the design/development environment of choice were not saying it will necessarily be that way forever. But at least it also gives us the ability to move on if it should ever happen but I dont think we will need to somehow :-) There are others on this list who can better rehearse the technical arguments for using Zope as opposed to any other development environment its also well document elsewhere on Zope.org. Personally, I dont believe any of the current VLE/MLE products will come anywhere near to what will ultimately be achieved through Zope. Weve only just begun to scratch its potential in terms of modelling the relationships between people, resources, tools and events there are amazing possibilities. As far as online learning environments are concerned - we feel the focus is shifting from a centralised institutional model to more individualised information environments, which are personal, private, and highly configurable These will be used by people to support their learning, research, management, teaching, and many other aspects of their lives what s more, individuals will have ownership and control of the technology as well as the content. Open standards, open source - Zope coupled with XML and XML-RPC/SOAP is going to be very special! Cheers, Joe Nicholls.

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[ ANN ] LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2 released
by Jens Vagelpohl 09 Apr '01

09 Apr '01

LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2, a user folder replacement that authenticates against an LDAP server, has been released. You can view some of the documentation and download the software at http://www.dataflake.org/software/ldaploginadapter. A Tracker at that same address allows you to easily file bug reports or feature requests for this product. Improvements and bugfixes since release 1.2beta1 (the last time a news release was posted) include: LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2 Bugs fixed: * Added a missing comma in __ac_permissions__ that broke changing roles via the "Security" tab on the LDAPLoginAdapter... * Completely revamped the exception handling in authenticate so that there will always be a (hopefully) helpful output in the log * authenticate had an exeption handler that would try and use a variable left uninitialized when the exception was thrown. LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2beta3 Bugs fixed: * The methods that manipulate the publicly available user object attributes now make sure to flush the cache of user objects and force all of them to be recreated, thereby making the changes "grab" immediately and not just whenever the user object expires all by itself and gets recreated. LDAPLoginAdapter 1.2beta2 Features Added: * A new management tab called "LDAP Schema" allows the manager to enter or delete attributes that describe the LDAP schema used for the LDAP user records. This completely replaces the misleading "Allowable User Attributes" found on the Advanced tab which had been abused to find out more about the LDAP schema in use. All select lists that list LDAP attributes are now driven by the attributes that are shown on the LDAP Schema tab. Features deprecated: * The "Special Users" and "Special User Roles" feature has been deprecated. I considered it a kludge in cases where you cannot set your LDAP schema correctly. With the advent of the LDAPUserManager product it has become trivially easy to add users and groups. This is the much preferred way of conferring roles to users. Bugs fixed: * Mishandled the loop to delete the public attribute mappings in manage_deletePublicUserAttrs which caused index errors * Default handling of method calls through the web or from python was inconsistent in regards to what to return and what to expect. All method signatures that might expect REQUEST now set it to a default value of None and in the method body test to see if it is None. This improves the use of methods from python where no REQUEST is guaranteed. * Change capitalization of manage_AddPublicUserAttrs to bring it in line with the normally used capitalization scheme * Renamed "Contents" tab to "Custom Forms" to clear up the meaning of this tab

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textarea editing alternatives
by Alex Verstraeten 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

I'm on the long quest to find a nice way to work with zope. the alternatives are webdav, ftp and the built-in web management screens WebDAV and FTP has the same problems: no syntax checking support on 'save' , no versioning support, no way to create a non dtml-document object, not all editors have built-in ftp support, so you have to mount ftp as a filesystem or use some tools to handle that.. Web manage: it's full featured, has all the things you need from zope, except that you have to deal with an ugly textarea editing. (or copy/paste to your fav editor) what I need is a way to work with version support, to create any kind of objects with *ANY* editor I want. What I've found so far is: lynx -editor=/usr/bin/vim and then ctrl-x e on the textarea to launch vim, this is great.. but lynx is kinda ugly to work with.. So I've tried w3m.. much better layout, with prefered editor support on textareas, but still, has some ugly issues, like not redirecting to the correct url's on the links.. so you have to Umanage_main after each click. Is there any other browser (x based if possible) besides w3m and lynx that support textarea editing using your prefered editor? I just dont find comfortable to create the objects via web and editing them via ftp/dav it's just too annoying. do I have any other alternatives ? thanks Alex

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RE: [Zope] attach and debug a running zope?
by Randall F. Kern 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

Just a quick follow up in case others need to do similar things. Wing IDE is cool! It didn't actually do what I needed, but it would be great for most problems. The problem I had was a hang inside a C extension, and WingIDE can't break ("Pause") while C code is running. So I did it all in GDB... Not easy to debug Python code using GDB, but it works. -Randy > -----Original Message----- > From: ender [mailto:kthangavelu@earthlink.net] > Sent: Friday, April 06, 2001 11:20 AM > To: Randall F. Kern; zope(a)zope.org > Subject: Re: [Zope] attach and debug a running zope? > > > On Friday 06 April 2001 16:30, Randall F. Kern wrote: > >>I'm trying to track down a nasty data-corrupting hang, and > would love to > >>get stack traces from the zope. > >> > >>I've tried A Very Cool Trick[1] from Barry, but I haven't > been able to > >>get it to work. Any solutions out there to get stack traces from a > >>stuck zope? > >> > >>[1] > http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/1999-June/006153.html > >> > >>Thanks! > >>-Randy > > you could try attaching it to it with wing ide. info at wingide.com > > hth > > kapil > >

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Zope crash - Zserver uncaptured exception
by elliott 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

I am new to Zope and python so this may be operator error and not a fault with the actual program. I have installed 2.3.1 on suse linux 7.1 and am having regular crashes with Zserver (standalone mode - port 8080). I am including the stdout in the hopes someone can help me suss the problem. If you could mail me directly (elliott(a)mail.cibertribe.pt) as well as the list I would appreciate it as I am on the digest. Apologies for the lengthy output. ------------stdout 2001-04-07T16:48:46 INFO(0) ZServer HTTP server started at Sat Apr 7 16:48:46 2001 Hostname: xxxxxxxxxxxxxx Port: 8080 ------ 2001-04-07T16:48:46 INFO(0) ZServer FTP server started at Sat Apr 7 16:48:46 2001 Hostname: xxxxxxxx Port: 8021 ------ 2001-04-07T16:48:46 INFO(0) ZServer PCGI Server started at Sat Apr 7 16:48:46 2001 Unix socket: /usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/var/pcgi.soc ------ 2001-04-08T08:19:48 ERROR(200) ZServer uncaptured python exception, closing channel <select-trigger (pipe) at 81a9390> (exceptions.OSError:[Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable [/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/asyncore.py|poll|83] [/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/asyncore.py|handle_read_event|335] [/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/select_trigger.py|handle_read|77] [/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/asyncore.py|recv|287] [/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/asyncore.py|recv|475]) Unhandled exception in thread: Traceback (innermost last): File "/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/PubCore/ZServerPublisher.py", line 97, in __init__ response._finish() File "/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/HTTPResponse.py", line 281, in _finish stdout.close() File "/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/HTTPResponse.py", line 338, in close Wakeup() File "/usr/src/packages/SOURCES/Zope-2.3.1-linux2-x86/ZServer/medusa/select_trigger.py", line 74, in pull_trigger os.write (self.trigger, 'x') OSError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe ----------end stdout Steven Elliott <elliott(a)mail.cibertribe.pt> Systems Integrator Interactive Tecnologia, lda. Lisbon Portugal

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NFGnav
by Olaf Marc Zanger 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

hi there, i have NFGnav 0.6 (with update to 0.7.1) in use for a website that i want to access through http://www.website.org/zope (through PCGI and apache rewrite) and at the same time through http://www.provider.ch:8180/ (through the method navbar_dtml uses <a href="<dtml-var itemURL>"> <dtml-with navbar> <dtml-in navItems sort=id> <dtml-if "inPath(REQUEST)"> <td bgcolor="#F9F344" align=center nowrap> <a href="<dtml-var itemURL>"> <dtml-var title></a> </td> <dtml-else> <td align=center nowrap> <a href="<dtml-var itemURL>"> <dtml-var title></a> </td> </dtml-if> </dtml-in> </dtml-with> unfortunately if i have a path in the BasePath-Property e.g. "/reports" it will overwrite the "/zope" part. if i don't have the path in BasePath-Property it will add up like http://www.website.org/zope/report/reports/reports on further clicks to these items. what do i do wrong? is there any way to use <dtml-var URL2> or so?? thanks for help olaf -- soli-con Engineering Zanger, Dipl.-Ing. (FH) Olaf Marc Zanger Lorrainestrasse 23, 3013 Bern / Switzerland fon:+41-31-332 9782, mob:+41-76-572 9782 mailto:olaf.zanger@soli-con.com, http://www.soli-con.com

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Re: [Zope] ZipFolder Problems - FIXED!!!
by Jens Quade 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

"Mohan Baro" <mcbaro(a)uwimona.edu.jm> writes: > What I found out is that you have to install both ZipFolder 0.2 and > ZipFolder 0.2.1 to work properly. Hmm, that's odd. I coudn't reproduce this problem. > It ingnored some files... should I be concened? No, if you really want those files on your Zope Server, better rename them. > ZIP file uploaded successfully, some files/folders ignored: > aaron.~by [...] ZipFile adds only files with names that are suitable as ID. This behavior is controlled by the check_filename function, which, by default, uses the regexp ^[A-Za-z0-9][\w\_\-\.]*$ to check filenames. jens

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PHP Object
by Norman Khine 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

Dear Ioan, Could you help me to implement PHP Object. I have installed it on FreeBSD which is running Zope 2.3.1b1 with python 2.0, I installed the PHP Object Product which is NOT broken and can add PHP objects within the Zope tree. To test this I created a new DTML Method, called test with the following script within it. <? phpinfo(); ?> I was hoping this to bring up ALL the details for PHP, but I get the following Error: Error Type: IOError Error Value: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '986726657_427.out' Traceback (innermost last): File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 222, in publish_module File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 187, in publish File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/Zope/__init__.py, line 221, in zpublisher_exception_hook (Object: Traversable) File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 171, in publish File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/mapply.py, line 160, in mapply (Object: <string>) File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/ZPublisher/Publish.py, line 112, in call_object (Object: <string>) File /usr/home/khine/usr/local/Zope/lib/python/Products/PHP/PHPProduct.py, line 107, in __call__ (Object: <string>) IOError: (see above) My setup presently is that I have a PHP project which I would like to manage from within Zope which sits behind Apache. Regards Norman

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Zope in academic/educational/scientific environments (important)
by Henny van der Linde 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

Hi, We (a smal group) have build a quite comprehensive (but still far from perfect in our opinion) Zope based system in wich teachers can offer websupport with their courses. It's a sort of content management system for teachers. Students can also deliver content. There are groupware fascilites and more. This is all realized in a rather large social sciences faculty within a dutch university. We have a relative large, happy, userbase but....... It has been quite a struggle. Not the development sec but 'selling' Zope as a platform and facing competitors in the ,so called weblearning world. Now we're facing a battle with Blackboard (I'm just recovering from an attack by some idiots who want to rebuild the whole thing with PHP, Dutch universities: never a dull moment.....). What realy would help us (in defending our system and Zope) is a list universities, schools etc. who are using Zope for educational/scientific/content management purposes. I'm monitoring/contributing to (not as much as some of you I'm afraid) this list and I noticed that quite some activity on the Zope front is happening in academic/scientefic/educational environments but I never kept any taps. So if you are using Zope in this sort of environment please let me know. You can mail me direct: linde(a)fsw.leidenuniv.nl. If I have a list I put it on Zope.org so that other people can use to defend their (potential) Zope efforts to decisionmakers, a sort of academic/educational showcase. Henny van der Linde

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DocBook + Zope
by Timothy Wilson 08 Apr '01

08 Apr '01

Hey everyone, I understand that there's quite a bit of interest in making Zope work well with XML. I'm an XML beginner, but I'm interested doing some writing using the DocBook DTD (the XML version). DocBook documents are easily converted to HTML, but how easily could they be incorporated into my Zope site? -Tim -- Tim Wilson | Visit Sibley online: | Check out: Henry Sibley HS | http://www.isd197.k12.mn.us/ | http://www.zope.org/ W. St. Paul, MN | | http://slashdot.org/ wilson(a)visi.com | <dtml-var pithy_quote> | http://linux.com/

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