[Zope] ANNOUNCE: Zope/XML Roadmap

[Tony McDonald]

At 10:05 am -0500 21/7/99, Ross J. Reedstrom wrote:
>Zopeists -
>Hmm, This all looks wonderful. It's particularly interesting to see
>Tony McDonald's project developing right along with the tools. (Don't
>you love living on the bleeding edge, Tony? ;-)

I'd rather not actually - it can bite! (mind you, you do get people 
interested in what you're doing :). But I'd been looking for a 
solution to my problem and a chance comment by a colleague (yikes! - 
suppose I'd been out of the room?) put me onto Zope and I've been on 
a learning curve ever since (Python, Acquisition, ZClasses etc. 
etc.). I have a working system running on Zope-1.10 using MySQL as a 
backend database, so I'm not cutting myself too much :). I do have a 
very sharp Zope 2.04 system that is about to get some new software 
installed on it though...

Thing is, that the new material that Amos and Paul mentioned today 
sounds almost *exactly* what I had planned for our system over the 
next 18-24 months! I'm prepared to lose the odd appendage to whizzing 
buzzsaws (figuratively speaking of course) if I can get that level of 
functionality.

>The real reason for my post is to ask all you XML gurus about the
>potential usefulness of AbiWord, the GPLed commercial word processor from
>the people at www.abisource.com. In many ways, it's an MS-Word clone,
>and it's cross platform - first targets, Win32 and Linux/(Unix/X/GTK,
>actually).  Interestingly, it uses XML as it's native storage format. It'd
>sure be cool to be able to use Zope as a sort of shared storage space,
>and hand my users AbiWord and a URL.

When I first figured that just about the only way to get these Word 
docs into a database was to use XML, I went looking for editors that 
had a Word look and feel, but which actually had the content held in 
XML. I couldn't find any that would be useful for our users. Your 
idea of using Zope as a shared space with an AbiWord/URL backend is 
very interesting - I'll just go download that software and have a 
look. Seems like the DC troops have unleashed more ideas....

>Tony, you mention doing the RTF->XML->Zope->HTML shuffle. What tool
>chain are you using for the first two conversions?
>
>Ross

Sure thing, it's Omnimark (http://www.omnimark.com/). I can't speak 
highly enough of this product. It definitely saved my bacon. The 
software I used to go RTF->XML is a program written in Omnimark 
called RTF2XML (http://www.sesha.com/omlette/rtf2xml/) and then I 
wrote a custom program in Omnimark to go from the RTF2XML output to 
my own form of XML. Omnimark used to cost 000's of dollars, but is 
now *free*. They do sell the IDE on Windows which is very useful. 
They're pushing to get Omnimark used on a par with Perl (it's pattern 
matching and XML element handling is very very powerful).

hope this helps,
Tone.
------
Dr Tony McDonald,  FMCC, Networked Learning Environments Project 
http://nle.ncl.ac.uk/
The Medical School, Newcastle University Tel: +44 191 222 5888
Fingerprint: 3450 876D FA41 B926 D3DD  F8C3 F2D0 C3B9 8B38 18A2