On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, James A. Hillyerd wrote:
Not all of the servers will have full time internet connections, so I can't rely on accessing them via the web. I think that copying a specific server's database over the previous Zope database, restarting Zope, editing properties and then repeating the process for the next server would be a pain. I'd much rather pull up pico and edit a static configuration file.
I friend of mine is a senior Unix administrator in a large company and I have been pestering him all along to give Zope a try. He was impressed with Zope but he said that unless something can be configured by editing text files it won't be easily adopted. The Web GUI is fine but not for configuring en mass hundreds of servers (which echoes your concerns). I was hoping to change his mind so I wrote a Zope product (XMLConfig available on the Zope site) that maps python dictionaries to a simple text format. The dictionaries can be modified either from Zope using DTML calls or by directly editing the text file. The changes are automatically updated in either case. Maybe you can find it useful although personally I don't like it and I don't use it. Alternatively you can use ZClient to automatically access and change the relevant properties.
Each server will maintain a seperate SQL database. I'd like to try and build all of the business logic into python objects, and call these objects from DTML and in some cases directly from the URL.
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/Hello/sayHello
My apache server is setup with the mod_rewrite so that the zope is accessed as http://localhost/Zope/
What do I need to do to install and experiment with this example?
If you have a lot of python modules that you need to web enable Zope might not be the best approach. Direct use of ZPublisher might be more appropriate especially if there is no 'content' that needs to be regularly updated from the web. The simplest way to publish a python module is calling ZopeHTTPServer (in your Zope distribution) with your module as arguments. Read ZopeHTTPServer's doc string for more info. Remember though that ZPublisher will publish instances of your classes and that only methods with a doc string will be published. Pavlos