[Zope] Getting started questions...

[Pavlos Christoforou]

On Wed, 17 Feb 1999, James A. Hillyerd wrote:

> Not all of the servers will have full time internet connections, so I
> can't rely on accessing them via the web.  I think that copying a specific
> server's database over the previous Zope database, restarting Zope,
> editing properties and then repeating the process for the next server
> would be a pain.  I'd much rather pull up pico and edit a static
> configuration file.

I friend of mine is a senior Unix administrator in a large company and I
have been pestering him all along to give Zope a try. He was impressed
with Zope but he said that unless something can be configured by editing
text files it won't be easily adopted. The Web GUI is fine but not for
configuring en mass hundreds of servers (which echoes your concerns). I
was hoping to change his mind so I wrote a Zope product (XMLConfig
available on the Zope site) that maps python dictionaries to a simple text
format. The dictionaries can be modified either from Zope using DTML calls
or by directly editing the text file. The changes are automatically
updated in either case. Maybe you can find it useful although personally I
don't like it and I don't use it. Alternatively you can use ZClient to
automatically access and change the relevant properties.

> Each server will maintain a seperate SQL database.  I'd like to try and
> build all of the business logic into python objects, and call these
> objects from DTML and in some cases directly from the URL. 
> 
> 
> http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/Hello/sayHello
> 
> My apache server is setup with the mod_rewrite so that the zope is
> accessed as http://localhost/Zope/
> 
> What do I need to do to install and experiment with this example?
> 

If you have a lot of python modules that you need to web enable Zope might
not be the best approach. Direct use of ZPublisher might be more
appropriate especially if there is no 'content' that needs to be regularly
updated from the web. The simplest way to publish a python module is
calling ZopeHTTPServer (in your Zope distribution) with your module as
arguments. Read ZopeHTTPServer's doc string for more info. Remember though
that ZPublisher will publish instances of your classes and that only
methods with a doc string will be published.

Pavlos