Each Monday I take accounting reports from an ancient VAX system and roll them into XML via Python and Perl scripts I have written (Python unzips the files and triggers Perl scripts to process them into XML). I then upload these XML files manually to my remote Zope server using the LocalFS product to upload and manage them.

I would like to automate this last part of the process to automatically upload the XML files to the Zope server which runs behind Apache with SSL. I am soliciting suggestions on the best way to upload these files automatically. Are there Python modules that can deal with logging into Zope, the SSL layer, and file uploading? Is this a good candidate for an XML-RPC application?

Nah, too much work. You should be able to use utilities/load_site.py, an uploading utility for zope. It isn't able to use ssl, but that should be easily circumvented by using tools like stunnel http://www.stunnel.org/ It creates an ssl tunnel to your server and runs on linux and windows (and a plenty of other *nixes) - I used just the linux version. You can than create the tunnel from localhost port 2000 via stunnel -c -d 2000 -r yourzopehost:443 and use load_site.py to connect to localhost:2000. I didn't use stunnel in conjunction with load_site/zope, but it should work. You can find related tools at http://www.openssl.org/related/apps.html cheers, oliver