[Zope] Zope X3 Milestone Release 4 is available for download

26 Nov 2003

      Hello everyone in the Zope community and beyond,

We are pleased to announce that Zope X3 MS4 is out of the door. Much work has 
been done since the last release in June, 2003, including major fundamental 
refactorings of the Component Architecture, I18n/L10n, filesystem syncing, 
and new TTW capabilities. Get it now! You can find a source and Windows 
binary archive at the URL below.

URL: http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/Milestone4

Here the release notes:

Zope X3 Milestone Release 4 is available for download

  What is Zope X3? It's Zope 3 "experimental". This is the release
  that will provide the new features of Zope 3 without any Zope 2
  support.   Zope 3.0 will provide support for Zope 2 content and
  products, probably using conversion utilities of some sort. 

  Backward compatibility notes

    - If you have any add-on prodycts that used the old context-wrapper or
      "context awareness" APIs, you will need to update these use the new, and
      much simpler, location API. See zope/app/interfaces/location.py.

    - If you have add-on products that register views or resources using the
      view or resource directives from the zope ZCML namespace, you will need
      to change the value of the 'type' attribute to refer to a request type,
      rather than a presentation type.

    - If you have an add-on product that defines new layers, you need to use
      the zope:layer or browser:layer directive to define the layer before you
      use it in a skin definition or a view or resource definition:

        <browser:layer name="rotterdam" />

    - If you had a local (through the web) adapter service, you will need to
      recreate it and reactivate your adapter registrations.

    - If you had a local (through the web) view service, you will need to
      create a local presentation service and reactivate your page or view
      registrations.

  Features

    - Changed the way presentation components are managed.

      o The view, resource, and skin services have been combined into a new
        presentation service.

      o Views and resources now adapt requests. They are registered for 
request
        types rather than presentation types.

    - Refactored the way interfaces, declarations and adapters are
      implemented. We now use a cleaner architecture that no-longer requires a
      caching mechanism beyond what's provided by the underlying data
      structures. This has led to a significant speed up for Zope 3.

    - Refactored the way location-related events are generated and handled.

      For more details, see:
      http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/LocationRelatedEvents
      http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/SimplifyObjectLifecycleAndLocationEvents

    - Refactored the way object location is modeled. Zope 3 no longer uses
      context wrappers. Instead, objects have __parent__ attributes that
      reference their containers.  Objects that don't maintain these
      attributes themselves are warpped in persistent proxy objects that do
      so.

      For more details, see:
      http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ParentGeddon

    - Added catalogs.  Catalogs can be used in two-ways:

      o Site-wide utilities

        A catalog is created in a site-management folder and
        registered as a named utility.

      o Local content objects.

        A catalog is added to a regular content folder.

    - Added object fields. Object fields provide a simple composite field
      mechanism. An object field is defined by a schema and, thus, can contain
      sub-fields.

    - Added working widgets for list fields. List fields contain a sequence of
      monogenous values.

    - Improved forms error reporting. Error messages now appear next to fields
      where errors occured.

    - Major fixes to the TAL I18n-Namespace support. Almost all fixes were
      backported to Zope 2.7 as well.

    - Templated Pages support for a <disabled script> tag, that allows 
inline Python
      code. The <disabled script> tag can be used in other TAL sources 
as well, but is
      turned off by default.

    - Internationalized all Zope 3 (Python, ZCML and Page Templates)
      user-readable strings. Zope 3 was then localized to German and partially
      to Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese and French.

    - Implemented explicit message ids in ZCML

    - New Persistent/Mutable Schemas allow us to generate Schema-based
      interfaces through the Web.

    - New local Menu Service and Content Component Definitions allow you to
      create simple Content objects TTW.

    - Major fssync improvements. The commands to use now are "zsync" and
      "zbundle". New flags include: copy, login (+ new options for checkout),
      logout, mkdir, resolve, revert. fssync behaves now very similar to SVN.

    - Introspector uses the Interface service now, instead of the ++module++
      namespace.

    - Refactoring and cleanup of the schema/form code.

    - Improvements to the OnlineHelp, which has been deactivated for this
      release since it is broken since the recent geddons.

    - ZODB 4: Changed serialization logic to support persistent proxies.
      Added an add() method to Connection and allowed it to run during
      commit().

    - In the future, Zope 3 will use ZODB 3, which will support new-style
      classes, since the development of ZODB 4 stopped in late summer.

    - Various improvements to ZConfig

  Miscellaneous

    - Progress with the TUV-IT security accredidation

    - Many maintainance work and bug fixes.

  Much thanks to everyone who contributed to this release:

      Jim Fulton, Christian Theune, Marius Gedminas, Tim Peters, Jeremy
      Hylton, Fred Drake, Sidnei da Silva, Philipp von Weitershausen, Steve
      Alexander, Guido van Rossum, Barry Warsaw, Albertas Agejevas, Viktorija
      Zaksiene, Andreas Jung, Anthony Baxter, Phillip Eby, Richard Jones, Tom
      Cameron, Kevin Littlejohn, Stuart Bishop, Andy Hird, Peter Simmons,
      Christian Theune, Adam Summers, Stephan Richter, Chris McDonough,
      Garrett Smith, Godefroid Chapelle, Paul Roe, Kiki Pruvot, Don Baarda,
      David Fregon, Rob Zaar, Jan Smith, Richard Volpato, Roger Ineichen, Gary
      Poster, Bjorn Tillenius, Martijn Faassen, Chris Withers, Paul Everitt,
      Dominik Huber

  Requirements

    Zope3 requires Python 2.3.2 or later. You might get a segfault when
    shutting down the Zope servers. This is due to a bug in weakref and 
    will be fixed in the upcoming Python 2.3.3 release. You can safely 
    ignore the segfault.

  Downloads

    - Source release:  "ZopeX3-0.0m4.src.tgz", 
      http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ZopeX3-0.0m4.src.tgz.

      Follow the instructions for building from source in README.txt.

    - A windows binary release: "ZopeX3-0.0m4.win32.zip", 
      http://dev.zope.org/Zope3/ZopeX3-0.0m4.win32.zip.

      This is an "in-place" build. Just unzip it and run it. 
      Use Python 2.3.2 and skip the building part of the instructions.

Regards,
Stephan and the Zope 3 team