[Zope3-dev] Fourth ZOPE 3 Mini-NEWSLETTER

[Gary Poster]

WELCOME TO THE ZOPE 3 MINI-NEWSLETTER: ISSUE 4 (9 DEC 2002)

   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.

   I'll send one of these out whenever we have enough to warrant it--
   just two or three submissions are enough, or one from Stephan :-)--
   and I'll also specifically  request news from the
   zope3-dev@zope.org group once a month.  I send  them to
   zope@zope.org and zope3-dev@zope.org (subscribe at
   http://www.zope.org/Resources/MailingLists), announce it on the front
   page of zope.org, and archive it at
 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3Newsletter

   No glossary this time around.

NEWS SNIPPETS:

   The Rotterdam Sprintathon has occurred, and the Vilnius sprint is
   going on now.  Rotterdam's work included a variety of exciting
   developments, much of which is photographed and described at
   http://www.infrae.com/sprintathon

STEPHAN RICHTER: Wiki, Docs, Internationalization, and UI

   Wiki Cleanup

     Since I noticed that many of the Component Architecture (read
     Zope 3) Wiki  pages have been outdated, I started cleaning some
     up and reorganizing the  structure of the entire site. During
     this cleanup I

       - changed the entry home page to reflect the most common links
	and interests.  There is still a lot more todo, since on the
	top we are still referencing the  VisionStatement and the
	ProjectArtifacts, both of which are totally out of  date.

       - reorganized the proposals section so that proposals have a
	common format and  old proposals are sorted alphabetically.

       - created a new first level sub-Wiki called SubProjects, where
	special  interest groups (SIGs) can organize their efforts.
	This was very necessary,  since there were many proposals
	that were simply general discussions and  thoughts and really
	did not belong in the Proposals section.

     Note: I created an IsOutdated status badge. Every Wiki that is
     out of date  should receive this badge!

   Documentation efforts

     While cleaning up the Wikis I also noticed the need to centralize
     and organize  the various documentation attempts into one
     projects. You can find the  SubProject at:
 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Documentation

     In the process, I sorted various documentation artifacts by
     audience, so that  it is ensured that *every* audience is being
     addressed by the new  documentation. David Murray and Paul
     Everitt already contributed new  artifacts to the Developer and
     User Documentation, respectively. I also  created an OnlineHelp
     proposal that will ensure the availability of narrative and
     auto-generated online documentation in Zope 3.

     The probably most interesting artifact that was created though is
     the  DevelCookbook, which is aimed to tell the Python-level
     programmer how to  write new components in Zope 3. There are
     about 8 chapters outlined already  and 13 new recipes are
     proposed. My goal is to find a Publisher for this book  and have
     it one the shelves at most 1 month after Zope 3.0 final ships.

   Reviving Internationalization

     It bothered me for a long time that I failed to complete the
     formatting  support via Locales for the I18n SubProject this
     summer. When I saw my  original proposal for the Locale support,
     I felt the need to update it and do  some prototyping. Shane and
     I then discussed some fine-grained issues.

     Here are some of the results and features: There will be a
     global  LocaleProvider that provides standardized (ICU) Locale
     information for  formatting and many other things. ICU has all
     this info in XML, so that we  will have immediately all the data
     we ever need. I have written prototypes  for parsing and
     formatting numbers and datetimes using their templating  system.
     Shane on the other hand, is thinking about a high-level
     LocaleService  that makes all the locale decisions for you, so
     that the application level  never has to deal with the I18n
     details.

     I plan to implement most of this proposal over Christmas.

   UI progress

     After following the latest discussions on the Zopetop (the new
     Zope Web-GUI),  I attempted to extract some realistic goals,
     which could actually be  implemented now. So far I came up with a
     LayoutWidgetService that manages  various layout widgets that can
     be used on a site. For more details see
 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/LayoutWidgetsProposal

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 and
 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/FrontPage
   but be aware the design docs often lag as we develop prototypes.
   Again, these newsletters and the compiled glossary are archived at
 
http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/Zope3Newsletter