cg@cdegroot.com writes:

Hi all,

I was off this list for the last half year or so, so I'm in for some catching up :-). In the meantime, a couple of quick questions:

I'm starting up a new project, Open Source Educational Software (www.oses.org for more details). Basically, I want to get people from various disciplines (teachers, pedagogues, graphics artists, programmers) together to work on classroom-software. The site must be highly collaborative, and friendly to non-technical users. Software will be mostly written in Java, so it can run on any box with a browser.

This is entirely off the topic of your questions, however a recent development in the Python world may interest you. Guido van Rossum, the benevolent dictator of Python, is working on an educational program based on Python whose details are not known to me. I looked for a link to the document Guido wrote but I couldn't find it on python.org or the CNRI website. Anyone know that link? I don't want to start a language war, but you might find Guido's analysis on the ease of kids learning different programming languages (I was pleased to see my first language, LOGO, came out very well) interesting. Java might be a bit too.. ahem.. "advanced" for your students. I will also bet you a six pack of FurTrapper Stout that Python runs on more platforms than Java does. Ok on to your questions...

Q1: is Zope the best environment to do this on? On the collaboration part, Zope's user features are great, and Confera is ok as well, but other things are lacking (chat, public file repositories, interfaces to CVS maybe, talkback areas at the bottom of most pages, etcetera).

Yes.

Q2: call me crazy, but I think that WikiWikiWeb is a great collaboration tool (http://c2.com/cgi-bin/wiki). There is a Python version, but I'd like to have this running inside Zope so you can apply Zope's management features to it. I talked to the author, he's interested, but maybe this alread has been done?

If there is allready a Python verison, then I think the author of that software should seriously look into Zope. Zope encompasses all of Python philosophies and extends them with it's own Pyhtonic Zen. Also, it is *very* easy with ZClasses (a feature of Zope 2.0.0a) to take existing Python code and turn it into a Zope application. By 'easy' I mean change a few lines of code, badda-bing (to quote The Other Mike Pelletier). -Michel

Thanks in advance,

Cees -- Cees de Groot http://www.cdegroot.com <cg@cdegroot.com>

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