[Zope] - zope jitterbug

[James Strickland]

On Mon, 7 Dec 1998, Alan Wostenberg wrote:

> I'm unfamiliar with Zope. Would it be an adequate tool to build an internet
> based bug tracking system: a clone of jitterbug (see
> http://samba.anu.edu.au/jitterbug/ or  http://www.gnome.org/cgi-bin/bugs
> )Would such a project be meaured in days, weeks, or months? Thanks!

Funny you should mention that... that's the main reason I'm looking at
Zope.  We have an internal tool for call tracking here which I wrote in
Perl before my Great Python Awakening, and before the existence of
Jitterbug (which I haven't looked at but I'm aware of its existence).
The system in use here has proved reliable but

a) it's written in Perl :-)
b) it does not implement a fast enough search
c) it does not yet handle multipart messages

I've written the bit which digests MIME (well, most of it is in the
standard Python library!) but storing all the little bits breaks the model
of the previous script.  I was going to rewrite everything (except Better,
this time, of course) in Python and thus I came across Bobo.  That was
just a week ago, so I waited for Zope to see what it was all about. 

Zope looks like it will do what I want very well, but alas there is almost
zero documentation to help me figure out how to do it.  It should be
relatively simple, as soon as I figure out how to define new classes.  The
classes are "messagepart" (decoded data from a MIME message part plus
Content-Type), "message"  (email header plus list of messageparts), "call"
(list of messages plus open-and-assigned-to-user-x/closed, notes field,
etc) and "user" (user-specific information such as name, email signature,
preferred way to display certain items).  I presume that each one of these
classes would be defined as a "product", but I'm not even positive about
that yet.  (I'm at Zen level 0.2, I'd say.)

In short, if I were a Zope expert, I think I could whip up a calltrack
system in a week.  Given that I'm not a Zope expert, I think it will take
n+1 weeks, where n is the number of weeks it takes for me to learn what I
need to learn about Zope (how to define classes, how MailHost fits in, how
to create new objects when email comes in).  Unfortunately so far it's
looking like n >> 1...

--
James Strickland
Perforce Software