Jeff wrote:
Do ZServer and Emacs play nicely together, nowadays? I remember reading something on the list a while back regarding some problems with this setup. Also, does Emacs' HTML mode handle DTML well?
Long discourse here. Warning: I'm not a talented Zope developer, not a talented developer of any kind, and not a horribly sophisticated Emacs/XEmacs user. I love Emacs. I'm using XEmacs a lot these days, but I'll just say Emacs. I've badgered Amos for two months now about getting EFS support working -- for me, Nirvana would be editing Zope directly from Emacs. Why is it so cool? Let me describe how it works first for those that don't know Emacs or ange-ftp/EFS. Yesterday I ran ZServer from my sandbox and fired it up with HTTP on port 9211 and FTP on port 9210. I then went into XEmacs and asked it to open the "directory": /someuser@somemachine#9210:/PaulStuff/ provided my login information stored in an acl_users folder and blam, there was a "directory listing" of all my stuff. I visited a test.html file, it loaded into a buffer and HTML mode turned on, colorizing my tags. I made a change and saved the "file". I then went into Netscape, pressed refresh on test.html and saw my changes. Beyond that it gets cool. You can mark twenty things on your hard drive and load them into Zope or vice versa. Presumably you could copy things from one Zope to another. You can use the excellent diff tools to see changes between a local version and a remote version or apply a patch sent to you by someone. If you make a mistake you can go into Zope and undo the changes. Ultimately there are some deep flaws with this. First, it's still FTP under there. FTP is security challenged, but more than that, it isn't an object system. How, via FTP, would you add a property to a folder? Change the security? Indicate a DTML syntax exception? Review the posts in a discussion folder? FTP is not part of the "web object model". There are some other "gotchas" as well. The current DTML syntax does not lend itself to playing nice with HTML editing modes in FTP clients such as Emacs, Dreamweaver, etc. Anyway, that's some of my thoughts on the subject. --Paul