Planet Zope blog

Archive for March, 2006

Zope News for March 1 - 15, 2006

March 20, 2006 at 8:56 am · Filed under Zope News

“I write this UML model and presto, I get all this with zero lines of code, wow neat.” - Paul Winkler

## On Vision

Remember last weeks discussion on the future of Zope 2 and 3 ? There hasn’t been a consensus yet on how to proceed with development, it seems things will move on like before - each party developing its own future of Zope.

(c) http://blog.planetzope.org/ There are a few interesting threads on the Vision thing though:
Jeff Shell first reinforces his vision of a smaller, more dedicated zope3 app-server and component architecture ([Zope3-dev] Two visions), then later suggests to create 3 new editions of Zope, namely Zope 3 CA (Component Architecture), Zope 3 AS (Zope 3 Application Server) and Zope Suite (Built on Zope 2 and leveraging elements of the Zope 3 CA and Zope 3 AS) ([Zope3-dev] Visionaire! (All your problems, solved)). A bit later he looses faith altogether in Zope: A Crisis of Faith. Coming this March to TNT (TNT! TNT!) and continues his rant, complaining there is no such thing like ‘The message of Zope‘ (Griddle Noise: Crisis of Faith: The Messengers Have Been Shot) while comparing it to ‘Rails / Django / TurboGears‘. Geoff Davis chimes in ([Zope3-dev] The vision thing), asking how to address Jeffs concerns and second, what lessions to be learned from ‘Rails / Django / TurboGears’.
Another facet is added with a NASA engineer perfectly presenting ([Zope3-dev] The vision thing) on the ease of TTW programming / configuration (Plone wins hands-down over J2EE, C++ and other heavyweights) - this lets some developers again rethink fs-only development.

In a somewhat related post on Python Marketing Ian Bicking tells us the bitter truth: ‘And if you want to market Python then please please please don’t do it on python.org, …’ — works for Zope and zope.org as well - no ?

## On Configuration

Martijn Faassen: ‘In this mail I’d like to make explicit some competing design influences on ZCML’ ([Zope3-dev] what is ZCML?)

Jim Fulton presents a proposal to use standard python module ConfigParser for high level configuration used by adminstrators or users installing Zope (Zope.org - Use ConfigParser for High-Level Configuration)

## On Sprinting

Philipp von Weitershausen has short overview info on the recent pycon zope sprints (PyCON 2006 Sprint Recap)

Shane Hathaway is going to solve the PyWebOff challenge using Zope3 ([Zope3-Users] PyWebOff) and he is asking for help.

## On Development

Jim Fulton clarifies: ‘The next [Zope] release will be in June. After that release, we’ll switch to a May/November schedule.’

Philipp von Weitershausen suggests to switch from ZopeTestCase (Zope2) to testrunner (Zope3 ): ‘Since Zope 3.2/2.9, we have a new testrunner in zope.testing. The test.py script is a small facade for it.’ (Death to ZopeTestCase!)

Releases

Zope related

CPS 3.4.0
After 1 year and 1/2 of work (more than 11000 commits by 32 developers) Nuxeo releases the new stable version of CPS.

Sprints, Conference News & Press Announcements

Zope 3 / Z3ECM April sprint in Paris at Nuxeo - nuxeo.com
Nuxeo, with the kind help of the Zope team of Chalmers University, plans to organise a Zope 3 sprint on April 17-21 (Dates changed from 3-7.April) in our premises in Paris. The focus of the sprint, like last year’s successful sprint, will be ECM.

Even more Links

zf.zscp - ZSCP Implementation (This package implements the process and Web site of the ZSCP)
Introduction to Zope 2 Application Development - This talk distills into tutorial form the fundamentals of application development for the Zope 2 platform, with some best practices and practical advice along the way. (Slides from the pycon2006 talk)
[ZODB-Dev] packaging zodb in eggs - Chris McDonough is taking a stab at packaging the various pieces of ZODB as eggs.
hello.swf - z3 ‘hello world’ package - screencast
pyvnc2swf is a cross-platform screen recording tool. It captures screen motion through VNC protocol and generates a Shockwave Flash (SWF) movie.
Colubrid is a WSGI request handler which simplifies python web developement.
page - The “page” Django application is a simple front-end renderer for HTML and XHTML content from external sources.
webstring 0.1 is a web templating engine that allows programs to manipulate XML and HTML documents with standard Python sequence and string operators. webstring was written as a wrapper for Fredrik Lundh’s cElementTree package
Python Web Framework Statistics
psf - Trac - The Pydotorg Redesign Site
CheeseShopDev
RDF/A Primer 1.0 - Embedding RDF in XHTML — This document introduces the RDF/A syntax for expressing RDF metadata (works with XHTML2)

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Zope News for February 16 - 28, 2006

March 4, 2006 at 8:18 am · Filed under Zope News

I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that I still know almost nothing about Ruby even after successfully building a working “application”. - Norm Walsh

Sam Ruby replies and compares RoR development to Progressive Disclosure (NWalsh on Rails):

[Progressive Disclosure is] the design principle that says to show overviews and hide details until the user requests more detail, and then to provide only the additional level of detail required.

This looks like the perfect Anti-Pattern to Zope development, in that Zope reveals the “application” to the knowledgeable developer only — a tradition Zope developers share with Python developers in general, but at the price of a much steeper learning curve. The promises of Zope Component Architecture eventually could lead to something similar to the RoR dev-cycle.

(c) planetzope.org Now Jim Fulton presents two possible visions for the future of Zope 2 and Zope 3 ([Zope3-dev] Two visions):

current vision is Zope 3 will eventually replace Zope 2
in an alternate vision Zope 2 evolves to Zope 5 and Zope3 is split into pieces

Quite a shock just at the time when development seems to have reached a stable path with Zope2.9 and Five integrating Zope3.2 and the future looks bright and - well - predictable.
Anyway, this post is widely commented - renaming, splitting, forking Zope2 and Zope3 is an all possible scenario, transforming Zope3 into a pure python library is discussed as well as creating different Zope master editions (CA, AS, Suite) - marketable to special user demands.
Commenting mood is good atm, the discussion is still going on and certainly will help a lot in clarifying the next development steps.

Philipp von Weitershausen suggests to deprecate Zope 2 interfaces for Zope 2.10 ([Zope-dev] Deprecating Zope 2 interfaces?) which is about one year from now and gets positive feedback.

Philipp von Weitershausen starts brainstorming about potential ways of making the creation of browser pages more Pythonic ([Zope3-dev] Brainstorming about browser pages) and presents a proposal on shrinking ZCML ([Zope3-dev] One namespace for ZCML) that is withdrawn later, summarized in a post from Jim Fulton

The Zope Software Certification Program and Common Repository Proposal is presented by Stephen Richter

With the development of Zope 3, the Zope developers committed to a new
development process and higher software quality guidelines. With the adoption
of Zope 3 technologies in the wider Zope community, we should also start
using the process for third party package development.

I have spent the last two weeks working on a proposal that defines a Zope
Software Certification Program (ZSCP) and a Common Repository that implements
this process.

People immediately jump on the idea, some voice the usual problems with IP delegation and distributed repositories. In a follow-up post Stephen writes

I have already working parsers and writers for all file formats. I have also a
preliminary (but tested) implementation of registering, managing,
unregistering a package in the repository with the ZSCP.

Kamal Gill has agreed to do some initial artwork for the site, which should be
done mid-March.

Looks like it is just a matter of days to get our hands on this exciting stuff.

Releases

Zope related

Zope2.8.6 and Zope2.9.1
Five 1.2.1 and 1.3.2
CMF-1.5.6
CMF-1.6.0: The CMF 1.6 release series acts as an intermediary between the stable 1.5 series and the 2.0 feature release. It allows developers an easy upgrade path from 1.5 and the ability to take advantage of one of the most interesting features from the upcoming major feature release, GenericSetup.
CMF-2.0.0-beta - The CMF 2.0.0 final release is planned for the end of March 2006 (CMF Release Roadmap)
ZopeTestbrowser 1.0.0 - The zope.testbrowser package used in the Zope 3 project for functional testing; this stand-alone version can be used to test or otherwise interact with any web site.

Sprints, Conference News & Press Announcements

Golden Roof AGX Sprint
2006-03-25 to 2006-03-29, Innsbruck, Austria
Golden Roof - AGX code generator sprint, Innsbruck, Austria, Saturday 25.03 to Wednesday 29.03.2006

SwissEasterSprint
2006-04-08 to 2006-04-12, Cham, Switzerland
The sprint starts on Saturday, April 8, at 9:00am and will end on Wednesday, April 12 in the afternoon. The official welcome activity will be at noon on April 8. The workshop will be located in Cham. Cham is a Town near Zug, Switzerland.