Zope 2.3.2 coming today and 2.4 will support python 2.1, Page Templates 1.2 are the neatest thing, Zope buzz in the media, beehive has more training classes, and SmartObjects come your way.

The opinions expressed in Zope 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 Zope News", mail:[email protected] for possible inclusion.

Upcoming Events

Linux Expo Brasil

Paul Everitt will be participating in the Keynote Session at the Linux Expo Brazil , being held on the 9th and 10th of May.

EuroZope Conference

The EuroZope crew is organizing a two day Zope only conference in Berlin on the 12th and 13th of July.

Those interested in participating should join the discussion on the EuroZope mailinglist

Zope in the Press

Zope recently won the Jolt Productivity Award in the Languages and Development Environments category.

Digital Creations and Zope came up as a good example of realism in Jay Greenspan's "Open Source Reality Check" on webmonkey.

Visit the Press Room for more details.

Zope Page Templates

by Ethan Fremen

Version 1.2 has been released! This version includes batching and tree widget capabilities. If that sentance failed to excite you, you haven't done enough of either in DTML. In the Page Template version, batching has a cleaner syntax, and with the tree function, you can precisely specify the HTML that the tree will use! YAY! (can you tell I'm excited?)

In addition, there are now some path modifiers, including if, exists, and nocall. The reason to be exited for this is you can say (if exists) this/thing/here and it will get replaced if it exists, and ignored if it does not!

There's other exciting bits: you should hurry on down and get yourself a copy

Zope Status

by Brian Lloyd

Summary

Zope 2.3.2 beta 2 and fishbowl cleaning

Recent News

Zope 2.3.2 beta 2 was released last week, to verify the fix for a straggling Catalog issue. We expect to finalize 2.3.2 this Friday.

Also last week, I was finally able to do some fishbowl scrubbing. The current proposals page had a number of proposals listed that had since been turned into projects and completed, and there was no real way to determine the status of any of the other proposals.

I have gone through all of the proposals and moved retracted or completed ones to the archive, and added a state notation (based on Jim's "ProposalStates") to each. Now we at least know what needs attention, and we can start working to make progress on these.

Work on Zope 2.4 has begun - if you haven't seen it, the initial Zope 2.4 plan is online at dev.zope.org

The major goal of Zope 2.4 will be to "officially" support (and require) Python 2.1. As a part of this effort, Andreas Jung has converted all the regex's in the zope source to re's.

beehive would like to announce:

1. new Zope training days

beehive is pleased to announce the availability of two new Zope training classes. Training will be conducted both in Europe (Berlin, Germany), and the United States (Washington, D.C.).

Please visit the beehive training page

for more information.

SmartObject design and development

by Stephan Richter

Summary

• Introduction to SmartObjects - Heated discussion about various aspects of the framework design - Progress with the project web site / community

Introduction

What is (or will be) SmartObjects? SmartObjects is a framework with which information from various sources (RDB, LDAP, IMAP, XML ...) can be organized as flexible objects via Zope. These objects use the Zope Security Model to implement their internal security. Many of the permissions are autogenerated and the programmer can pick and choose any combination of permissions to implement security for her/his specific needs. Furthermore, SmartObjects will support a facility to auto-generate any HTML Forms. Furthermore, localization is implemented at the very core of the framework, so that it will be no hassle for the developer to make use of it. SmartObjects is the successor of DBObjects (work for SQL data only), which are used as a benchmark for the current development. For more information please visit iuveno's product site

Heated discussions

Almost 60 messages in the last 8 days are proof that many people are interested and desperate for such a general framework. At the moment the security is discussed and many different point of views are collected. The method of querying through data is also under fire, since it will be a challenge to search through attributes that can come from anywhere. Moreover, Paul Everitt (Digital Creations) adds much value to the discussion by telling us what DC is planning in this area and how we could make the design more Zope friendly, so that an integration of SmartObjects with Zope would be easier. Thanks Paul! So, did I get you interest? Do you want to have your voice heard too? Come and join the mailing list (accessible from the products page; see link above)!!!

Progress

• brushed up the Web Site a little to put more information up there
• fixed the Web View of the CVS
• started implementing the three core classes: SmartObject, SmartPropertySheet and SmartProperty
• setup mailing list
• invited developers to join
• Phillip (publisher of Znolk) will port Znolk to SmartObjects
• Kapil (first developer to react to my original mails) will help with the Web Site and also work on some UML diagramming
• Thoughts about the design are collected (via mailing list)
• Relaese Plan and original Task List are published (web site)

If you like to join the effort, please go to ivueno-net and join the mailing list. It is very exiting and I think in a couple of months (when I plan the first major release), we will have a very nice little tool, that will make your application development in Zope much easier by automating annoying repetitive tasks, such as HTML Form generation, SQL Development and Security Implementation.

Zope Web

by Ethan Fremen

New organization idea at new.zope.org . Keep in mind that this is mostly for the way the areas are organized. None of the links work and NS 4.x treats it a bit odd. Let us know what you think

Searches on zope.org are now anded in addition to searching ID. If you've had trouble searching before, try now- it should be better.

-EOT-