WELCOME TO THE ZOPE 3 MINI-NEWSLETTER Find out what's going on in Zope 3 development, then contribute your opinions, your experience, and your code to one of the most exciting Open Source projects going. Most news is submitted. Tell us what you're doing! Send anything from a sentence to a few paragraphs about your latest efforts, be they code, documentation, research, or design, to gary@zope.com. We'll send one of these out whenever we have enough to warrant it-- just two or three submissions are enough--and I'll also specifically request news from the zope3-dev@zope.org group once a month. The newsletter begins with a high-level glossary that might help you understand a bit about what's going on with some of the announcements. Want to help others get a grasp on your favorite Zope 3 (or Zope 2) concept? Send in a definition, or request one, or fix these. LITE 'N' EASY GLOSSARY: Starred items have definitions also in the glossary Event Service: An internal system (not intended to be external) that can send events to interested object subscribers. I18N: a W3C standard for internationalization; includes Unicode. See http://www.w3.org/International/ ObjectHub: A way to assign an object's path in the *ZODB* to an integer unique to that hub instance. Thanks to the *Event Service*, the ObjectHub can maintain the integer-to-object-path relationship even if the object moves...theoretically. First we need some something to send the appropriate events! Persistent: the base class that makes it possible for an object to be stored (mostly) transparently in the *ZODB* Relation Manager: A central place to store relationships between objects, giving some very simple and basic relational-database-like functionality. A client of the *ObjectHub*. ZCML: Zope Configuration Meta Language. The XML language that is the file-system configuration tool for site administrators. One uses it to declare new Zope 3 products, new services, new views, and so on. ZODB: Zope Object DataBase. A way to store Python objects persistently; an underlying technology of Zope 2 and 3, but also available in a stand-alone distribution. NEWS SNIPPETS: * First edition of the Zope 3 newsletter! Thanks to the Melbourne OzZope interest group (http://www.ozzope.org/) for the idea. * Thoughts on improving I18N internationalization support: see http://dev.zope.org/Members/nheiich/drafts/z3_i18n_d1 * Jim Fulton requests thought on CMF Content Type vs. Zope 3 Interfaces vs. ??? in preparation for the SPRINTATHON in Rotterdam, Dec 2-6: see http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2002-October/002988.html * A Zope 3 alpha by end of 2002? Wiki vs. PEP? Find this and more at http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope3-dev/2002-October/002960.html PYTHONLABS' JEREMY HYLTON: Persistence Improvements We've been making some improvements to the core persistence implementation and trying to make persistent modules and classes usable. The Persistent base class is now used for regular persistent objects and for custom C types like BTrees. It only provides an __dict__ for instances of the type if the most derived type is a new-style class that does not use __slots__. (Objects with __slots__ aren't supported yet, but they probably will be in the future.) This change allowed us to remove lots of C code. Unfortunately, it requires a custom metaclass to work with Python 2.2.1; in Python 2.3, the metaclass is just an alias for type, the default metaclass. Jim [Fulton] and I have done some minimal work to make persistent modules usable in Zope3. You can create modules through the web using the service manager -- one of those places where you get lots of funny ++ stuff in the URLs. When the modules are updated, the function and classes are updated in place. The code and interfaces are still pretty rough; I'm still learning how the feature will be used and expect to make improvements based on experience. R. DAVID MURRAY: Zope Configuration Meta Language (ZCML) Improvements and Automated Documentation I'm currently working in rdmurray-metameta-branch on a set of changes to the configuration system. The changes allow reconfiguration of configuration directives, including the metaconfiguration directives. I then use this to change the meta-config directives to support additional attributes and subdirectives so that the basic documentation for configuration directives can be specified in the meta.zcml files. I'm currently working on the program that extracts this data and builds the namespaces.zope.org subdirectory hierarchy in doc. GARY POSTER: New Placeful ObjectHub, Relation Manager Proposal I took advantage of some significant flight time (and jet-lagged insomnia) to work on items centering around the ObjectHub. I'm trying to get some consensus before I check anything in, but hope to get something in this weekend. I am particularly excited about the Relation Manager--thanks to Andy Bulka for pointing out his pattern and discussions at http://www.atug.com/andypatterns/RM.htm that explore some of the implications, problems, and promises of some very similar approaches. I also stole the name from him (I did shorten it a bit). ;-) STEVE ALEXANDER: Aiding, Abetting, Speaking, Organising After an absence of several weeks, I've been getting back into the world of Zope 3. I've been working with CodeWorks in Lithuania, helping them with their work on CacheManagers, organising a Sprint here in Vilnius, and reviewing Gary's recent work on the ObjectHub and RDM's improvements to documenting the meta-directive files. A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk on Zope 3 at the Universite de Savoie at Chambery, France. The slides are available on their webpages somewhere, and consisted of Jim's OSCOM talk, and some discussion of Zope 3 security, stitched together with my thoughts on the benefits of component software, and how it allows for interesting economic patterns between collaborating companies. The Sprint will be in Vilnius from Tuesday 10 December to Thursday 12 December. As well as myself, Albertas, Marius, Vika and Brad from CodeWorks, and Jim from Zope Corp are definitely attending. There's still room for some more sprinters! NEWS CONTRIBUTION GUIDELINES: We want to know what you're doing, be it code or design, so just write something quick and easy. First person and casual is fine, as you can see. Send to gary@zope.com whenever the spirit moves you. LEARN MORE ABOUT ZOPE 3: See http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope3-dev See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FrontPage but be aware the design docs often lag as we develop prototypes.