G'day,

Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening.

Any opinions contained in the Zope Weekly News are those of the chronicler exclusively.

Announcements

• Digital Creations announced that the next generation of its Zope application server will leverage browser technology from the Mozilla project.

  http://www.digicool.com/News/mozilla

• Python.Org announced the Redesign Python.Org Contest. The talented winner shall receive great fame and... erm... that's it, really. Have a try and have some fun.

  http://www.python.org/Redesign.html

New Products

• "slef" has released an intruiging product called ZInstaller. The objective is to enable Zope users to download and install new Zope packages from the comfort of their web browser.

  http://yyy.zope.org/Members/slef/ZInstaller

Updates

• Zope 2.1.1 has been released. This is a bug-fix release that includes fixes for better handling of multiple-write conflicts, undo-related problems and problems that prevented certain third-party Zope products such as Squishdot from working. For more information, see the file CHANGES.txt in the doc directory of the distribution.

  http://yyy.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.1/

• "4am" released an update to his Python Methods product. The present version is 0.1.7. Python Methods are, as the name implies, methods writen in Python, but which live in the object database rather than on the filesystem.

  http://yyy.zope.org/Members/4am/PythonMethod

• "Bill" reports that KnowledgeKit 1.6.7 has been released:

  "This is a minor feature upgrade. Per request, there is now a simple How-To object integrated into the KnowledgeBase portfolio. While not yet as cool as cool as Zope.org's, it is usable."

  http://yyy.zope.org/Members/Bill/Products/KnowledgeKit

• Another alpha release of XML Document is out. This release fixes a number of bugs thanks to patches form diligent Zope users and addes a few minor features.

  http://yyy.zope.org/Products/XMLDocument

• "anthony" has submitted "yet another minor release of SQLSession".

  http://www.zope.org/Members/anthony/software/SQLSession/

• Jim Washington updated his ZRTChat product. ZRTChat provides real-time chat with an entierly HTML interface. (No java, javascript, etc.) The present version is 0.2.0.

  http://www.zope.org/Members/jwashin/ZRTChat

• Pavlos Christoforou has released version 0.2.0 of FSSession. FSSession manages session data (that is, per-browser data) and stores it on the filesystem. (Compare with SQLSession.)

  http://www.zope.org/Members/gaaros/FSSession

Zope.org items

• "Duncan" submitted a How-to entitled "Session data stored in URL":

  "This how-to describes how to use Anthony Baxter's SQLSession product in conjunction with 4am's SiteAccess product to store a session id in the URL without the need to set any cookies."

  http://yyy.zope.org/Members/Duncan/SessionURLs

• "Bill" posted a new How-To: "How to delete a catlogAware object that is no longer catalogued".

  http://yyy.zope.org/Members/Bill/Documentation/CatalogBadness

Notable Discussions

• There is a very informative thread with the subject "Zope stability". Michel explains how to use Zope's debugger and a number of techniques for developing in safe sandboxes and synching with a production server are discussed.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015181.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015209.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015214.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015240.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015245.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015267.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015296.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015301.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015351.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015389.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015427.html

• Michael A. Alderete kicked off a thread called "Zope Performance Methodology?". He outlines in good detail what would be needed to produce a document about optimizing Zope's performance. He goes into everything from the underlying platform to Zope tuning parameters to optimal coding practices. Numberous people write in to fill in his blanks.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015254.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015270.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015270.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015278.html

• Brian Lloyd discusses the future of Zope in "Zope direction and 2.2 roadmap".

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015297.html

• The ZODB and Zope objects are explored in "Philosophical question - Zope Objects vs Entities in a RDBMS". Questions raised (and answered): How well does the ZODB scale? How does the ZODB compare to traditional RDBMS for efficiency? Can I tread ZClass objects like normal Python objects? What limitations does Linux's filesystem impose, and how can I get around them? How can I make SQL results act like real objects?

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015299.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015300.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015359.html

• Timothy Wilson asks if anyone has written an application such as a technical support department might use to track issues. A couple leads are given.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015317.html

• "reality check" -- Ocasionally becoming a religious debate, Jonothan Farr sparked off a mailstrom with forwarded comments on Zope's lack of documentation. Opposing lines are quickly drawn: Zope has the worst documentation known to mankind vs. Zope's documentation is pretty good, really. Zope is too hard vs. Zope is pretty easy, application servers are just complex. Zope needs to appeal to a wider audience vs. That's what FrontPage is for.

  Amongst the lively expressions of opinions, some attempt to advance the documentation cause. Members of the ZDP remind everyone that they are busilly working away, and would you like to lend a hand? Also, the next generation of Zope documentation is briefly described.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015393.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015445.html

• Bruce Perens's Zope server was on the receiving end of a multiple slashdotting. He reports that it came through with flying colours.

  http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-December/015506.html

-- Mike Pelletier.