Howdy folks. I thought I'd share the results of something we delivered yesterday and see if anyone here thinks it's useful. We are pursuing a contract for a think tank that wants to provide an interactive presentation of a data-driven policy decision. The deliverable must run completely off a CD-ROM without installation of anything and use a standard web browser with no tricks. First we whipped up a quick Zope site that had a few cosmetic pieces in it. For a demonstration application we took 1600 recent Zope mail messages, made a ZClass for them, then loaded them into Zope and catalogued them. Next we took the "read-only" machinery that _might_ be in Z2b4 (it's in my sandbox), that allows ZServer to run without writing a pid file or log file, and ZODB to run in-memory. You're still allowed to do everything with the database -- add objects, undo, versions, etc. -- but no changes are made on disk. When you quit, the changes are gone. Very useful for giving demos as well. Finally I copied the directory onto a CD-R. Sure enough, you just double-click on start.bat (I don't know anything about autorun) and, after a bit of a wait, everything runs just fine. Absolutely nothing gets written to the hard drive. It's still a little rough. First, there's a whole lot of unnecessary stuff being imported (like all the win32 stuff for running as a service), and thus the startup time is around 45 seconds. With some serious tinkering I imagine that could be brought under control. But still it's a neat opportunity for Zope. Where else can the app server _and_ database be cranked up with one click and leave your system in a nice state? Try that with ColdFusion or Domino. :^) If anyone thinks this would make a good "How-To", either for the part about running in read-only mode or the mail archive application, lemme know. --Paul