Paul, I've thought about doing something like this, but with a slight difference. I would like Zope running on a CD-ROM but allow the user to add objects etc and save the Odb to disk, but nothing else on the harddrive, only the odb. Then at an appropriate time I would like an auto-synchronisation to take place with the 'real' Zope Server, at our site. This would allow me to use Zope as a distant learning tool. The students could do the course off-line and then sync with our server and allow marking by a cource tutor at a later date. I may very well take your bits and 'extend' them for my own use. The HOW-TO would be a great pointer for me though, so what you hanging around for, get to it and do it ;). Yours in anticipation, Phil phil@philh.org ----- Original Message ----- From: Paul Everitt <paul@digicool.com> To: <zope@zope.org> Sent: Thursday, August 12, 1999 11:57 AM Subject: [Zope] FYI: Running Zope off a CD-ROM
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
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