RE: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap
I've used Amos' work a bit, so I can describe some neat things about it. As for editing, well, it's pretty neat. You can edit the XML Document as a whole, or you can go to a specific element (by, what else, adding /manage to it) and get a TEXTAREA to edit it. Surprisingly, the element attributes (right jargon?) show up as editable Zope properties. Let's say you go to an element and add a property. When you look at the XML, an attribute has been added to the element. What's particularly nice about this is that it doesn't version the entire XML text, only the Zope representation of the element. This naturally means that the cache manager can swap out the elements that aren't being used. Amos created a "slide show" demo for me to replace my clumsy way of doing presentations. I can now write the slide show material as one big XML document. The body is still written as structured text and an attribute signals its format. The elements acquire a document that uses DTML to render the contents into HTML, including previous and next buttons. I can also do conditions to see if, for instance, a slide has been marked private. Needless to say, I can have multiple presentations of the same data, or even ship the XML back in toto to IE5 or Mozilla with a style sheet. I very, very much like how Amos has done this in a way that reinforces the good things about Zope rather than a me-too approach. URLs march into the tree of an XML document. Try that with other stuff. Elements can acquire a management screen and different templates for rendering. Try that with other stuff. I'm particularly excited with the prospect of hooking up the Catalog and indexing elements individually, as far as I know there aren't any open source indexing systems for XML yet. At the same time, Cathi Davey here has taken steps to give Zope objects a DOM interface. One particularly interesting use of this is to use XQL as a query language for Zope. In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions. It ought to be exciting! [P.S. could someone on the XML-SIG list post a reference to Amos' message?] --Paul
-----Original Message----- From: Tony McDonald [mailto:tony.mcdonald@ncl.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, July 21, 1999 4:46 AM To: Zope List Subject: Re: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap
This is really good news. At the moment, I go through a *lot* of hoops to get my study guides into an XML format (from RTF) and then into SQL so that they can be delivered through a Zope frontend in good old HTML. An example of what we do is at http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/nle/demo/ (select the 'database driven study-guides' link)
One thing that we want to be able to do is edit the material online - however, to do that means that we need to recreate the XML element, together with it's attributes from the SQL entry, and then put it in the right place in the XML document hierarchy. Then go through the conversion process again. If I can put my XML documents more or less 'as-is' into a Zope system, I am going to be one *very* happy camper!
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
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At 6:40 am -0400 21/7/99, Paul Everitt wrote:
I've used Amos' work a bit, so I can describe some neat things about it.
Many thanks Paul,
As for editing, well, it's pretty neat. You can edit the XML Document as a whole, or you can go to a specific element (by, what else, adding /manage to it) and get a TEXTAREA to edit it. Surprisingly, the element attributes (right jargon?) show up as editable Zope properties. Let's say you go to an element and add a property. When you look at the XML, an attribute has been added to the element.
This is starting to get *very* nice. Would I be able to add/delete a specific element from a folder and be able to export the resultant structure in an XML format? Would the URL to get to the <author> element in this XML document <?xml version="1.0" ?> <library> <book size="folio" pages="200"> <title>The art of War</title> <author>Sun Tzu</author> </book> <book> .... </book> </library> look like ... /library/book/author ? what would you do about multiple authors?
What's particularly nice about this is that it doesn't version the entire XML text, only the Zope representation of the element. This naturally means that the cache manager can swap out the elements that aren't being used.
Amos created a "slide show" demo for me to replace my clumsy way of doing presentations. I can now write the slide show material as one big XML document. The body is still written as structured text and an attribute signals its format. The elements acquire a document that uses DTML to render the contents into HTML, including previous and next buttons. I can also do conditions to see if, for instance, a slide has been marked private. Needless to say, I can have multiple presentations of the same data, or even ship the XML back in toto to IE5 or Mozilla with a style sheet.
I like the idea of using a document to render the contents into HTML. One thing that we'd want to do (eventually) is to render the contents of a succession of elements into RTF. Whoops, it seems like your last sentence answers my question about exporting into a XML document.
I very, very much like how Amos has done this in a way that reinforces the good things about Zope rather than a me-too approach. URLs march into the tree of an XML document. Try that with other stuff.
This 'tree-marching', it wouldn't be XPointer based would it?, that would make for interesting URLs!
Elements can acquire a management screen and different templates for rendering. Try that with other stuff.
:) another question answered!
I'm particularly excited with the prospect of hooking up the Catalog and indexing elements individually, as far as I know there aren't any open source indexing systems for XML yet. At the same time, Cathi Davey here has taken steps to give Zope objects a DOM interface. One particularly interesting use of this is to use XQL as a query language for Zope.
This is getting really freaky - when I first looked at getting our material online in a sensible fashion (ie using XML), I thought about using XQL as a query engine, but it was too beta and only available in Perl.
In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions. It ought to be exciting!
Exciting? this sounds a *lot* more than that Paul - I know what I'll be doing this weekend.. Whew! 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
Tony McDonald wrote:
At 6:40 am -0400 21/7/99, Paul Everitt wrote:
In closing, there is now a bunch of stuff in Zope that provides a basis for people to come up with interesting ideas and extensions. It ought to be exciting!
Exciting? this sounds a *lot* more than that Paul - I know what I'll be doing this weekend..
This is indeed a *very* nice way to deal with XML in Zope. It also seems to be the natural Zope-Zen way; evidence is that both I and Maik Roeder had a similar set of ideas independently. Me just this week, but okay. :) Regards, Martijn
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? ;-) A lot of people talk about collaborative content development these days, nice to see some one doing it. Actually, with these tools all open source, it's a lot less risky than being an "early adopter" of the latest and greatest vaporware. 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. Tony, you mention doing the RTF->XML->Zope->HTML shuffle. What tool chain are you using for the first two conversions? Ross -- Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer Computer and Information Technology Institute Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005
Speaking of XML as a shared file format, <!--#shameless plug-->KOffice is supposed to be using XML once it is complete as well...<!--#/shameless plug--> :) Jens Vagelpohl
>>>>>>>>>>>> Original Message <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
On 7/21/99, 11:05:01 AM, "Ross J. Reedstrom" <reedstrm@wallace.ece.rice.edu> wrote regarding Re: [Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap:
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? ;-) A lot of people talk about collaborative content development these days, nice to see some one doing it. Actually, with these tools all open source, it's a lot less risky than being an "early adopter" of the latest and greatest vaporware.
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.
Tony, you mention doing the RTF->XML->Zope->HTML shuffle. What tool chain are you using for the first two conversions?
Ross -- Ross J. Reedstrom, Ph.D., <reedstrm@rice.edu> NSBRI Research Scientist/Programmer Computer and Information Technology Institute Rice University, 6100 S. Main St., Houston, TX 77005
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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
participants (5)
-
Jens Vagelpohl -
Martijn Faassen -
Paul Everitt -
Ross J. Reedstrom -
Tony McDonald