[Zope] - FYI: Zope Roadmap for next two months

[Paul Everitt]

Howdy all.  I've attached below a quick snapshot of things happening for
Digital Creations and Zope.  The roadmap finally allows me to answer
some of the questions coming up here in the Zope community.

--Paul

Paul Everitt       Digital Creations
paul@digicool.com  540.371.6909

Zope Roadmap

  For about two months I have made attempts to write down a roadmap
  that described future directions for Zope.  I could never find the
  right format for detailing the items, though.  No one likes to go on
  record making promises.

  I settled on the following format as a good compromise that allows
  me plenty of wiggle room.  Each of the items below has a number
  between one and three in front of it.  A one means we are quite
  likely to do it in the next two months.  A three means we have done
  some work on it and are likely to do more work on it, but don't
  expect too much progress.

  The easiest way to get us to change priorities, of course, is
  through consulting.  Many of the items in the list are in support of
  existing consulting projects.

  I'll start with Digital Creations, as some of the items we are
  looking at impact the Zope community.

    o (1) Hire seven more folks.  I expect us to have concluded
    employment contracts with another seven people by the end of
    February 1999.  We are pretty busy on consulting contracts right
    now and, as you can see, have quite a backlog of Zope work to do.

    o (1) Get ten case studies online.  Just about everybody new to
    Zope and/or Python wants to see something done with it.  We *have*
    done interesting work, we just need to package it up to make the
    case studies and testimonials visible.  By the way, giving us some
    good words to put on the website about Zope really, really helps
    us convince newcomers to try it out, so pitch in!

    o (1) Relocate offices.  By the end of January we will have
    switched offices as we need a lot more space.  Needless to say we
    have a disruption facing us but we are doing a good job of
    managing it so far.

    o (1) Business plan for 1999.  There are a couple of trends that
    are emerging on the scene in 1999, most notably the mainstreaming
    of open source.  We would like to position ourselves to capitalize
    on these trends.  Thus we are reviewing our business plan and
    having a board vote first week of February.

    o (1) Start a Zope Hosting Provider program.  I have a page mostly
    finished for a signup and have two companies that have indicated
    serious interest.

  The following is a list of initiatives in the Zope area that are on
  our radar, though some rely on continued funding from consulting
  projects, which can be tough to predict:

    o (1) Tabula and indexing structures.  We are going to begin a
    slow process of moving pieces of Tabula into Zope.  The Zope 1.10
    release will put the BTrees, integer sets, and indexing machinery
    into Zope.  Tabula itself will be available just afterwards for a
    small audience of those willing to work with us on it.  Over time
    this will mean Zope will scale up much, much more.  In the
    nearterm it allows the Zopespot project to get kicked off.

    o (1) Start Zopespot.  We have been planting seeds for a while to
    do a "Slashdot" in Zope.  I have been working on a requirements
    document off-and-on for the last two weeks.  More importantly, Ken
    Manheimer was hired to be the shepherd for this project.  More to
    follow in a separate post.

    o (1) Release overhauled versions of the four main documentation
    artifacts.  We hope to have by the end of this week new,
    overhauled versions of the Zope Manager's Guide, the DTML guide,
    and the SQL Methods (formerly Aqueduct) guide.  When Tabula makes
    it out we will publish its documentation.

    o (1) Zope 1.10 released.  Zope 1.10 will include:

      - BTrees and integer sets

      - The SearchIndex package which has a number of indexing
        classes, including classes for field indexes and text indexes.

      - Property management broken out into a separate mixin

      - Properties DTML Documents, Images, and Files

      - Image patches provided by Ty Syrna to allow size attributes

      - New absolute URL feature to allow images to referred to from
        different folders more easily

      - Bug fixes, plus anything else I've forgotten

    o (1) Relocate zope.org.  Starting this week we are relocating the
    website which has a big fat pipe to the Internet, as well as
    people more talented than us to look at it.  We'll make a separate
    announcement about this.

    o (1) Public CVS server.  When Ken gets here I imagine he'll move
    pretty quickly to getting a public repository available using CVS
    or Perforce.

    o (2) Confera released.  When the machinery from Tabula goes back
    into Zope we can brush up Confera and release it.  Confera
    provides threaded discussions that include moderation, full-text
    searching, and more.  Documentation was also written for it so
    we'll brush that off as well.

    o (1) WebDAV.  Brian Lloyd has made quite a bit of progress on
    WebDAV.  Our goal is to get Zope's hat in the ring for WebDAV as
    soon as realistically possible.

    o (1) Zope/Medusa with FTP.  As you may have seen on Friday, Amos
    and Jim have worked with Sam to iron out an architecture document
    for Zope/Medusa.  We should have an alpha release this month of
    Zope/Medusa with PCGI, HTTP, and FTP implemented as Medusa
    handlers.

    o (2) A formal Zope query language.  Adding a standard query
    language, such as OQL or XQL, has recently become pretty
    important.  I hope that we will show some progress on this over
    the next month or two.

    o (2) Zope2 beta with full concurrency.  It is very important that
    we make progress on the architecture described by Jim's
    "BoboPOS3alpha1" paper.

    o (2) XML.  Zope is a great fit for XML, even better with the
    machinery from Tabula going in.  We also see XML becoming the
    basis for other initiatives, such as WebDAV and RDF.  However, we
    just can't squeeze out the time to dive in deep.  Rather, we'd
    love to see more community progress like that which popped up this
    weekend.

    o (3) Offer Collector.  A good number of people have asked about
    contracting with us to get the Collector software for tracking
    bugs reports, feature requests, and more.  Thus we might have a
    Zope-based solution available and packaged that our customers can
    drop into their sites.

    o (3) Replication.  Being able to copy the contents of a main site
    to a local site, make changes while offline, then replicate them
    back up is a compelling opportunity for Zope.  And it isn't that
    unrealistic, as some of the machinery is there already in the
    undocumented manage_exportHack operation.  However, until it pops
    up on a consulting gig I doubt Digital Creations will return to
    it.

    o (3) Progress on "Python Interfaces",
    http://www.foretec.com/python/workshops/1998-11/dd-fulton-sum.html.
    Many of the initiatives we start around here seem to cross
    territory where we wish we had interfaces.

  Of course I might have forgotten a thing or two here or there.  I'm
  sure you folks will let me know if I have. :^)