November 16th Zope Weekly News

2.3 on its way, tips on how to use the Zope Book, PTK 0.9.2 released with lots of bug fixes, Documentation Process feedback requested, and the whys and wherefores of Zope.org.

The opinions expressed in Zope Weekly news are solely the authors', and not the opinions of Digital Creations, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

If you or your company are doing something cool with zope, submit it to the Zope Weekly News for possible inclusion.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Tying up the 2.2.3 release

Recent News

(Reprint from last week but worth repeating - we really want feedback on this!) Documentation is currently a weak area for Zope. Ironically, the problem really isn't a lack of content, its a lack of organization among those who produce useful documentation. The current documentation "process" is not well-defined, so Amos and Michel have started a Fishbowl project to develop and formalize the process of producing Zope documentation. The end result of this will be a well-known and discoverable process that will allow the community to take better advantage of the "documentation energy out there",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/DocumentationProcess/FrontPage

Adam Davis' proposal for several "quick fixes" that we could make to the Zope management interface to improve productivity in the 2.3 release timeframe has become an "active project",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ManagementInterfaceQuickFix

Toby Dickenson has started a Python 2.0 Migration proposal - the idea is to identify all of the issues involved in using Zope with 2.0 and what we still need to do to make Python 2 "officially supported",

http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/Python20Migration

Near Future

The evil "__call__" bug is now officially stamped out (thanks to those of you in the community who tested the fix!), which was the last bullet left before making the Zope 2.2.3 release. I expect this to be out on Friday (Nov 16).

Documentation

by Michel Pelletier

All's quiet on the book front. We're still getting good comments; special mention goes to Lee Hunter who sent us great editorial comments on Chapter 8. We've gotten a lot of comments along the lines of:

I can't find out how to make a Python Method, and
I downloaded Python Methods from Zope.org but they don't work.

The answer to the first question is: Python Methods do not come with Zope 2.2 (but they will come with 2.3), you need to get them and install them. Normally you would get them from Zope.org, but the answer to question two is: The version of Python Methods on Zope.org is old, and it will not work with the book examples. You need to check Python Methods out of CVS in order to get the examples to work. You can do this by following the instructions and getting the CVS module for Python Methods . Sorry folks, we don't have any control over the release schedules for the software, so hopefully this gets updated soon to make it easier for you to follow the book.

This week Amos and I are pushing for the final effort on the new Documentation Process . We need your comments! We've gotten some good ones so far, but we need to make sure this jives with everybody, including the community, and especially the geeks at Digital Creations. Check it out.

State of the PTK

by Tres Seaver

I have uploaded a tarball for the 0.9.2 release of the PTK; it can be found at: http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK.

ZopePTK-0.9.2-src.tar.gz: Wizard and DemoPortal products are only available as export files. Note that many changes are available only in the updated DemoPortal product.

Please see the Install notes.

Changes

9.2 (2000/11/15)
- Removed antique UML from snapshot tarball.
- Cleaned up PortalFolder's implementation of the "metatypes" protocol required by ObjectManager (working on copy/paste/import issues). Tracker #'s 116, 130, 131, 133. (Note that some problems still remain, buried in the guts of Zope's paste machinery and acquisition/security interactions).
- Restored content migration code (for pre-0.8 content). Tracker #129.
- Added "expiration filter" to catalog searching. Tracker #46.
- Corrected interface breakage caused by changes to DublinCore implementation. Tracker #'s 109, 114, 115, 119, 122, 126.
- Implemented "browser sniff" in the css_aware stylesheet code; NS4 should get styles inline, while less brain-damaged browsers continue to get <link href="..."> version. Tracker #124.
- Added one-pixel, transparent spacer.gif to all interfaces; may fix some "broken pipe" Medusa tracebacks. Tracker #128.
9.1 (unreleased)
- New "Software Engineering" interface (soon to be the basis for a fishbowl/dogfood site).
- Split DublinCore into three interfaces:
  - DublinCore, for external queries
  - CataloguableDublinCore (returns dates for better searching)
  - UpdatableDublinCore

Added indexes/metadata to catalog for these fields.

Suppressed non-content (e.g., DTMLMethods) in folder_contents display.
Cleaned up some of PortalFolder's interface warts, and its registration as an addable object.

Please direct questions to the Zope-PTK list ([email protected]), and submit bug reports (patches would be great!) and feature requests to the PTK tracker (http://www.zope.org/Products/PTK/Tracker).

Zope Web

-- by Ethan Fremen

What's Up With Zope.org?

Yesterday, Zope Newbies Asked what was up with zope.org Specifically, they wanted to know why it was so darn slow.

The truth is that Zope has outgrown it's home. Zope.org, with its more than 10,000 objects, consumes between 100-150 megabytes of ram This is more than an average site would consume: we have a large number of pages that are fairly frequently visited, whereas most sites have a small number of very active pages. That's for the ZEO Client: The storage server consumes another 50mb or so.

When spiders hit us, all of our pages try to get loaded into ram, which (as the ZODB has nearly 600mb of "active" objects) leads to zope.org hitting the limit of physical RAM.

I put in a robots.txt to block spidering and reduced the cache "recommendation" to 700. The first was a good idea, the second was not, and is the proximal cause of zope.org's slowdown. I have since increased it to 2000, which seems to have helped quite a bit.

I am working feverishly this week to move us to our new cluster, which should alleviate the problem. With multiple ZEO Clients running, I intend to make spiders hit one ZEO Client, while keeping the other ZEO Clients open for human use.

-EOT-