Yet Another Conference Report from IPC9 my thoughts on spending a few days at the conference. it was a blast. i finally got to put some faces to some names that i see on this list and other python lists, and got a chance to hang out with some DC folks. these guys like to party. word to the wise, beware those bearing snake tatoos:) Zope Stuff -DC reaches out to developers. DC in its everlasting wisdom has seen the light. namely, that zope should be KISSing developers not forcing them on the infamous Z (rotate 90%) learning curve. Zope will grow its market share and walk new roads when Zope embraces the developers that use it so they can create kickass products with their favorite appserver. so how does this mystical feat happen. (check list) 1. DC realizes that this is a good thing (TM). X Check 2. Zope goes modular, components and interfaces all the way. (Its coming). 3. Documentation is driven by interfaces and written for developers. (Its Coming) -Interfaces and Components This talk by Michel Pelletier was cool. Michel demonstrated some of the ideas and technologies that Zope will be embracing. I think this part has been overlooked by most of the conference reports, but i feel it is the best thing to happen to zope since.... well zope. nutshell version. components, interfaces, services, adaptors, something i forgot. basically everything zope has an interface, instead of subclassing a half-dozen classes to get standard zope behavior you can have your objects implement the proper interface and be done with it. Interfaces are all about separating the API from the implementation. which in the case of zope is desparetly needed. but wait there's so much more. you can hook up objects with different interfaces via adaptors. you can have some objects provide services like discovery of objects with particular interfaces... michel didn't finish his presentation but the kicker was a demo of a new type of publishing based on the component/interface architecture. drool factor X. i could use this in applications right now, if only DC would release the code (hint, hint, hint...). oh well, i'll settle for the paper for now. basically it worked like this, the publishing method would take an object and the Interface of the request (standard would be HTTPRequest) and a factory object would return an adaptor object which could connect the two interfaces. the publish method would call the adaptors traverse function to get the next object if didn't exist then it would call the last object found's publish method. imagine the possbililties, selectively opening up your zope objects to new protocols (xmlrpc, soap). traversing sql/ldap databases. zope arch outside of the web.... but there is so much more to the component model, you can walk up to an object and ask it what interfaces it supports so you can interact with it dynamically at run time. you can generate accurate documentation about your objects from the interfaces. you could create some nifty translators that would make your objects xpcom accessible, generate wdsl. (these are michel's ideas not mine). zope developers, get excited. the changes won't come all at once but the gradual changes might be astonishing enough. to see some examples of interfaces, basic components in action dig through the CMF. interfaces are in 2.3 btw lib/python/Interfaces side note - i heard a saying that sometimes when you think you've got an idea you can talk to jim fulton, and he can just say you're wrong, and bam it hits you. you're wrong. and then it happened to me:) -Debugging the zope way. check it out, (it helps if you're running zeo so you can browse and type), else shutdown your zope. cd lib/python/ python
import Zope Zope.debug('http://localhost:8080/foo/index_html?bar=a)
(theres lots more to it than that but thats what i remember). if something breaks you get to keep both pieces. aka i'm not being held responsible if you hose something. -emacs is cool. diehards unix types already knew this (whats vi?), but kenM of dc has a patch that jim fulton was using when demonstrating zope debuging that moved you to the appriopate file and method call.... my jaw is still recovering from the floor. i guess nowadays, when every python ide worth its salt (wing, komodo) can do this its no longer amazing, but damm i was impressed. -ZEO is distributed zope (duh) i don't know why this didn't hit me before, but zeo lets you do all sorts of new apps with zope, basically offering cheap python distributed communication and interaction. i've been searching for ways to interact with zope my python proggies, but my thoughts previously have always focused on shared external data stores, i hadn't really thought long enough about ZEO possibilities. -Pythonlabs goes ZODB - nough said - new berkely db zodb storage (no reference counting). - multimaster replication is good for you. (many moons will pass). - can you say zope has great documentation. not yet, but it looks like its coming. - Emacs is the life, but wingide just took my soul. i can't say enough good things about wing. bottom line, it saves me a lot of typing. i think the company is cool, they're giving back to the community both with key pieces of technology and offering open source developers free licenses. (please buy a copy anyways, they need the loot to make it boot). did i mention that the source browser kicksass and you can debug zope with it:) - I need more speed Scotty, philip elby and ty sarna are back at it again. they're trying to make your head hurt, but this time they're armed with documentation, so the not so oo, AOP, GP, enlightened can grasp on to something. meet transwarp, the successor to zpatterns. (interestingly enough philip admitted that zpatterns was one glorious hack on delegation in zope). and even better its not zope dependent. um... i can't really say much about this one just check out philip's zope.org page for more info. he started weaving and i started dodging:) between this and the component technology that should come into zope Other Web Stuff -webware - what can i say.... i like it. its not mature yet, but the source is readable (i will never accept the 1 letter variable name optimizations in zope), and its based on existing mature technologies namely java servlets, j2ee's entity beans (the MiddleKit OR mapper) and Apple Enterprise Web Objects. since i'm posting to the zope list, i'll let you find the url. i think there is some potential for cross-pollination of ideas and code here, if the license issues are compatible (i think they are). TaskKit a generic python daemon scheduler would be extremely cool to have in zope. -pywx/aolserver - Micheal Haggerty and Titus Brown have pulled off one hell of a piece of enginerring IMO. they took aolserver, an extermely high performance multithreaded webserver (it powers aol, and ArsDigita.com bet their business on it a long time ago), that was years ahead of its time (it came out in like 95), and comes with persistent db connections, a rich api that rivals some operating systems, and tcl as scripting language, and they made python a first class peer with tcl in it. (i like run ons, can you tell). i watched them at the conference where they basically made a webware adaptor in like 20 mins. zopitistas take note, these guys are seriously investigating replacing zserver with aolserver. besides having a high performance web server written in c, it will also allow you much greater flexibility in caching, since you can use aolserver to cache in memory (shared by all threads). incidentally i use aolserver with the acs (arsDigita) and its a nice platform, but if i could use python with it yikes, its scary. i can't even imagine using zope with it.... Random Artifacts -java in zope. JPE ... nough said, check it at also check phil harris's post on the matter to zope-dev a few months ago. http://www.arakne.com/jpe.htm -berkely db - robin dunn, updated cvs sometime today, because i just got the latest berkely db 3.2.9 linked up with bddb3 (the python module), and it passed the 130 odd unit tests included. very cool, nice work robin. Sign This Petition - IPC10 in amsterdam. well that was the petition at ipc9. dtml-contract - part shameless plug, part sheepless grin. i got some pointers from mr fulton on how to make this product work better, but i put out two releases which had indent errors in the same day. yikes, i think beer affects debugging:). anyways this very cool dtml tag is now functional and ready for downloads at http://www.zope.org/Members/k_vertigo/ZopeProducts/PageContract btw, if enough people bug me about the license being obnoxious i'll switch it to the LPGL (ChrisW, what are you waiting for:) this concludes YACR cheers kapil thangavelu