At 10:05 am -0500 21/7/99, Ross J. Reedstrom wrote:
Zopeists - Hmm, This all looks wonderful. It's particularly interesting to see Tony McDonald's project developing right along with the tools. (Don't you love living on the bleeding edge, Tony? ;-)
I'd rather not actually - it can bite! (mind you, you do get people interested in what you're doing :). But I'd been looking for a solution to my problem and a chance comment by a colleague (yikes! - suppose I'd been out of the room?) put me onto Zope and I've been on a learning curve ever since (Python, Acquisition, ZClasses etc. etc.). I have a working system running on Zope-1.10 using MySQL as a backend database, so I'm not cutting myself too much :). I do have a very sharp Zope 2.04 system that is about to get some new software installed on it though... Thing is, that the new material that Amos and Paul mentioned today sounds almost *exactly* what I had planned for our system over the next 18-24 months! I'm prepared to lose the odd appendage to whizzing buzzsaws (figuratively speaking of course) if I can get that level of functionality.
The real reason for my post is to ask all you XML gurus about the potential usefulness of AbiWord, the GPLed commercial word processor from the people at www.abisource.com. In many ways, it's an MS-Word clone, and it's cross platform - first targets, Win32 and Linux/(Unix/X/GTK, actually). Interestingly, it uses XML as it's native storage format. It'd sure be cool to be able to use Zope as a sort of shared storage space, and hand my users AbiWord and a URL.
When I first figured that just about the only way to get these Word docs into a database was to use XML, I went looking for editors that had a Word look and feel, but which actually had the content held in XML. I couldn't find any that would be useful for our users. Your idea of using Zope as a shared space with an AbiWord/URL backend is very interesting - I'll just go download that software and have a look. Seems like the DC troops have unleashed more ideas....
Tony, you mention doing the RTF->XML->Zope->HTML shuffle. What tool chain are you using for the first two conversions?
Ross
Sure thing, it's Omnimark (http://www.omnimark.com/). I can't speak highly enough of this product. It definitely saved my bacon. The software I used to go RTF->XML is a program written in Omnimark called RTF2XML (http://www.sesha.com/omlette/rtf2xml/) and then I wrote a custom program in Omnimark to go from the RTF2XML output to my own form of XML. Omnimark used to cost 000's of dollars, but is now *free*. They do sell the IDE on Windows which is very useful. They're pushing to get Omnimark used on a par with Perl (it's pattern matching and XML element handling is very very powerful). hope this helps, Tone. ------ Dr Tony McDonald, FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/ The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888 Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2