The Zope News for August 31, 2001

by Chris McDonough ([email protected])

Welcome to the Zope News for August 31, 2001! The top stories this time around include: Zope 2.4.1 beta 1 released, a new ZEO beta is announced, Paul forks off a kid, versioning is hot, Tim Peters gets paid, Zope for Mac OS X, a big fat client, and a Zope-XPath marriage is proposed.

And now for something completely different...

Front Matter

It would have been an excellent several weeks in the Zope community if it hadn't been for the SciFi Channel's re-running of the entire Farscape series on a daily basis (every night, 8pm... well, at least in the US). The actual viewing and discussion of the show has so sapped productivity lately that we're sending Ken Manheimer to forcibly dismantle the transmitter next week. Wish him luck. ;-)

Seriously, however, a few people asked last week for me to link the blurb topics in this document's overview section to the respective items in the news text due to the sheer size of this thing. I would have done this, but, well... I didn't. ;-) Sorry!

Zope Core Software Development and Releases

Zope 2.4.1 beta 1, a minor bugfix release, was released on August 17. It's available from http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.4.1b1 .

Jeremy Hylton announces a new ZEO (Zope Enterprise Objects) beta release: "At long last, the fourth and final beta release of ZEO 1.0 is available at http://www.zope.org/Products/ZEO.. I expect to release 1.0 final next week." ZEO turns the Zope object system into a distributed architecture, allowing multiple processors, machines, and networks to act as one website. It also basically rules the universe, as far as I'm concerned.

Software Development Proposals and Projects

Michael Bernstein continues to gain momentum (and lots of comments) on his SecurityJihad proposal, which aims to tighten out-of-the-box Zope security for developers. See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/SecurityJihad .

Dylan Jay proposes to allow Zope objects to be queried via XPath. See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/ZDOMXPath . His PrototypeObjects proposal, though not particularly new, is also very interesting. http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/PrototypeObjects

Shane Hathaway and Jim Fulton's Component Architecture project is turning out to be the genesis of a future "paradigm shift" for Zope development and has received a lot of discussion lately. See http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ComponentArchitecture/RecentChanges..

BackTalk is a system based on Zope which allows users to comment on prestructured booklike content through the web. I put BackTalk out a while back on SourceForge, but I haven't really advertised it. I'll do so now. http://sourceforge.net/projects/backtalk/ . This is unspported software, is sparsely documented, and is available only through CVS at the moment. Comments appreciated. A BackTalk demo is available at http://serenade.digicool.com:8187/ZopeBook . Design credits go to Bruce Eckel, Bill Venners, and Kent Hoxsey. Developers wanted!

Ken Manheimer produces a comprehensive set of requirements for Zope versioning. This appears to be a step in the direction of encoding a revision-specification scheme into URLs, which looks a little weird at first glance. http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Proposals/VersioningForContentManagement

David Shaw makes his second beta binary release of Zope for the Mac OS X platform. It includes Python, his lickable GUI Zope control tool (http://homepage.mac.com/dshaw/ for screenshots), ZEO, and some other assorted goodies. Download it from http://homepage.mac.com/osx/

The Zope Fat Client project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/zfc/), run mostly by our friends at NIP Ltd. is a project aimed at.. well, in their own words, "The Zope Fat Client project aims to explore the space of an interactive and potentially distributed Zope client to compliment Zope's current paradigms."! That's a mouthful. But it looks interesting!

Security Notices

No security notices since the last News issue.

Documentation Development and Releases

A CMF FAQ was started on the "dogbowl": http://cmf.zope.org/Members/tseaver/how_tos/faq_announce .

I don't think it has been mentioned before in the Zope News, but the documentation folks at Zope Corporation continue to kick out new "Articles" which highlight hands-on use of some of Zope's core technologies. For more info, see http://www.zope.org/Documentation/Articles . The latest article from Michel Pelletier is about using Zope with Amaya, Dreamweaver, and other WYSIWYG HTML tools.

Hernan Foffani updates ZopeSHELF for Zope 2.4! The Zope Shelf is a compilation of the Zope Book, the Deveveloper's Guide, the How-Tos, the Articles and an HTML and CSS Ref Guide in Microsoft HTMLHelp format. http://www.orgmf.com.ar/condor/zopestuff.html

News Summaries

No news summaries since the last News issue.

Zope Corporation Goings-On

No real news to tell on the "opening" of the Zope CVS. We're still waiting on a wet signature document. The project makes its home, however, at http://dev.zope.org/Wikis/DevSite/Projects/ZopeCVSMigration/FrontPage..

Paul Everitt, Zope Corporation principal, is the father of Charles Merlo Everitt, some-odd pounds, some-odd ounces born a few days ago. I'm as usual a little hazy on the details (there was no stork mentioned and I didn't a very good glimpse of him with all the other folks hovering over him and coochy-cooing), but the point is that Paul's a new father. Wish him well via [email protected] !

Zope Corporation has established a mailing list to specifically discuss issues which arise when integrating Zope and various relational datbases -- [email protected]. Any posting from "how do I?" to "but..." and the ever-favorite "help with ...!" is fair game. If you have an interest in subscribing, please visit http://lists.zope.org/ today, and sign up to the Zope-DB list.

EuroZope Goings-On

There were no updates on the EuroZope site at http://www.eurozope.org since the last News issue.

Zope Sightings

I had fun attending the Washington DC Zope Python Users' Group (the DC ZPUG) meeting. There are incriminating pictures. http://www.chrisabraham.com/article.php?sid=109&mode=flat&order=0 . I shepherded a Q&A session without any real topic, after which Andreas Jung (also an employee of Zope Corporation, but desperately pretending not to be) gave a talk about Python as middleware.

Michael Roberts of Vivitek writes a piece for IBM developerWorks about how to extend Zope and Python in C. http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-pyzo.html . He appears to have really gotten traction since his last developerWorks article about Zope in April titled "Zope for the Perl/CGI programmer" ( http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-zope.html ).

I missed this in last week's issue. Dennis Tenney from Linux Weekly News interviews Guido van Rossum and Jim Fulton. See http://lwn.net/2001/features/oreilly2001/GuidoJimInterview.php3 . Inside, Guido talks about how he likes Zope Corporation, and Jim talks about the component architecture and PHDs.

Jon Udell mentions Zope in his byte article on paying forweb services. http://www.byte.com/documents/s=1113/byt20010822s0003/0827_udell.html

Tim Peters explains how Zope Corporation calculates his pay rate. http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&selm=mailman.998686118.5319.python-list%40python.org

Spoke Technologies' CrankSet is a commercial website-building tool based on Zope. http://www.spoke.net .

Maik Roeder's Uzopia has an (older but fascinating) tidbit about how to use the underscore in Python to retrieve the last evaluated expression, as well as some other interesting stuff. You learn something new every day! http://uzopia.editthispage.com/ (scroll down about midway for the underscore hack explanation)

Zope.org Meta Matter

Due to Zope.org bandwidth and storage abuse by "warez" and MP3 distributors, we were forced to close a few accounts and remove an estimated 2 GB of files, and place some restrictions on File upload sizes. This means that Members can no longer upload files over 500 KB in size. Sorry! Blame society.

Webalizer traffic statistics output for the systems that make up www.zope.org is available at http://ns1.zope.org:82/ .

The Zope.org site itself has weathered some minor but obvious tweaks lately, mostly having to do with graphics replacements in the header and sidebars. Many thanks to Penney Simpson!

Zope.org Almanac

The Zope.org Almanac lists select new or updated content spotted on Zope.org since the last release of the Zope News.

Selected News Items

New York Zope Users Group

http://www.zope.org/Members/vito/zope_meeting_08_29

New Or Updated How-Tos

Compiling ZMySQLDA for Zope 2.4 on win32 with MSVC

http://www.zope.org/Members/isalsberg/MySQLDA/Compiling_ZMySQLDA_%20win32

Building ZPatterns C extension

http://www.zope.org/Members/Julian%20Munoz/InstallZPatterns

Viewing folders and objects in VRML (3D)

http://www.zope.org/Members/knudriis/vrml

Selected New Or Updated Software Products

Cache documents via mod_perl module for Apache

http://www.zope.org/Members/xgwsbae/ZopeProxyCacheManager

SiteAccess with enhanced VirtualHostMonster

http://www.zope.org/Members/sfm/SiteAccessEnhanced

Strip-o-Gram HTML Conversion Library

http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/StripOGram

Debugging aid for Zope users

http://www.zope.org/Members/hathawsh/ZDebug

Image Tag "Monkey Patch"

http://www.zope.org/Members/bowerymarc/ImageTag_Hotfix

Patch to make work Z SQL Methods with Transparent Folders

http://www.zope.org/Members/fquin/SQL.py.patch

BesserWisser (multilingual knowledge base)

http://www.zope.org/Members/EIONET/BesserWisser

ZEO ClientStorage

http://www.zope.org/Members/natsukashi/Products/MountedStorage

Render StructuredText to HTML with images

http://www.zope.org/Members/Barabbas/stx_to_html

Squishdot

http://www.zope.org/Members/chrisw/Squishdot

Photo and Photo Folder

http://www.zope.org/Members/rbickers/Photo

Photo

http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo

Informix Database Adaptor

http://www.zope.org/Members/mark_rees/ZInformixDA

Znolk SQL Wizard: A Wizard that creates forms for manipulating SQL data

http://www.zope.org/Members/zwork/Znolk_SQL_Wizard

Site Tracker Product

http://www.zope.org/Members/peterbe/SiteTrackerProduct

[email protected] Mail List Summary for August 18 - 31

People can't get enough of drinking from the firehose that is the [email protected] mail list! There've been roughly a bazillion messages posted since August 17, 2001 (the day of the last Zope News). Interesting messages and threads include those below.

Giorgos V. reports curious TCP slowdowns with Zope on FreeBSD

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097880.html

Carl Blesius tries to make life easier with INSTANCE_HOME, Dario helps

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/097914.html

Folks help Robb Allen get the Zope Tutorial going

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098049.html

A discussion about dynamically generating text graphics in Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098089.html

Marc Fischer kicks off a discussion about autostarting Zope

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098149.html

Bill Anderson makes a request about the naming of "hotfixes"

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098311.html

Brian Lloyd rules from the bench about the hotfix issue.

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098439.html

The image "not-hotfix", ImageMagick, and PIL

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098367.html

Kyler Laird kicks off a discussion about web-trojan-horse security

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098436.html

ViNiL wants input on a Czech Zope portal

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098594.html

Zope's hasRole API call syntax and history is discussed

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098684.html

Michael Montagne wants to use vim to edit Zope code and finds out how

http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/2001-August/098710.html

End Matter

The opinions expressed in Zope News are solely the authors', and not the opinions of Zope Corporation, The Zope Community at-large, or the Spanish Inquisition.

If you or your company are doing something interesting with Zope, please submit a blurb to Zope Weekly News for possible inclusion by emailing Chris McDonough (mailto:[email protected] ).

For prior editions of the Zope News, see http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/

What Is Zope?

Zope is an open source web application server that can be used for managing website content, building intranets, and creating portals. For more information, see http://www.zope.org

Zope is built using the Python programming language. For Python information, see http://www.python.org