Planet Zope blog

“… required to pay the Python Software Foundation a royalty of $US 1.25 per installed copy.” PSF News: Python 2.5 Licensing Change - April 1, 2006

“The inflow of cash will enable vital changes, like changing __main__ to ___main___, and finally get rid of unittest and doctest.” - Tim Peters

Tres Seaver starts eggifying big parts of Zope3 (Palladion Software: Eggifying Zope), now available at download.zope.org/distribution.

Stéfane Fermigier, Stephan Richter, Maik Röeder and Tarek Ziadé join forces and create zope-cookbook.org, a website that gathers recipes and tutorials for Zope 3.

Philipp von Weitershausen updates his proposal to Make zope.app smaller (or PackageGeddon Directors Cut).

Christian Theune: DZUG [German Zope User Group] is preparing a fair booth on the Linux Tag and wants you to submit Your best Zope (3) tricks.

Zope Europe Association changes its name to Zea Partners (Zea) — a non-profit business partner network for companies building Zope systems. The site also features the Zea Screencast Library.

Jeremy Hylton on the Python Tutorial Wiki effort:

It’s probably the most important Python documentation project going. There haven’t been 175 edits to the tutorial in the last five years.

If we only could do such a thing with zope.org … (sigh)

Releases

• Infrae releases Silva 1.5.3
• Python 2.5 (alpha 1), the first alpha release of Python 2.5 is available from python.org
• Divmod Nevow has reached release version 0.8.0

Useful Links

• Authoritative Metadata - a W3C TAG document on how each message’s control data and payload should be interpreted
• W3C Working Draft - The XMLHttpRequest Object - This specification defines the XMLHttpRequest object, an API that provides some HTTP client functionality
• David Goodger & Chris Liechti just published Easy Slide Shows With reST & S5 - “How to create quick, good-looking presentation slide shows with Docutils/reStructuredText and S5″
• Guido van Rossum: Python 3000 - Adaptation or Generic Functions? - “We’ve started discussing Python 3000 for real. There’s a new mailing list and a branch.”
• Python Cheese Shop: dataurl 1.0 - Module to convert to and from Data URL [RFC2397]
• simplejson is a simple, fast, complete, correct and extensible JSON encoder/decoder for Python 2.3+. It is pure Python code with no dependencies. It’s now the recommended module for Python use by JSON.org (replacing json-py).

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“Lets step back and look at why we created ZCML” - Jim Fulton

Jim Fulton writes about the zope.configuration package, a framework for defining and overriding configurations ([Zope3-dev] zope.configuration).

Philipp von Weitershausen posts: “We want to make zope.app smaller so that it only contains things vital to the Zope 3 application server” ([Zope3-dev] Making zope.app smaller).
This is the long-term goal - the short-term goal is that Zope 2 won’t have to include Zope3’s zope.app anymore in the future.
His ideas are well received and he publishes the official proposal MakeZopeAppSmaller to zope.org.

Martijn Faassen: “Let’s come up with a plan for widgets. We have a very nice widget system in Zope 3, but it’s not perfect. There are a bunch of things that could be improved…” ([Zope3-dev] a plan for widgets?). Yet Gary Poster discloses that ZC has a plan to develop - based on a current project - what is needed as “zc.widget” and open-source it at the end.

ZClasses have been deprecated with Zope2.8.
Now Jim Fulton claims that [Zope-dev] IMO ZClasses should stay - with several developers supporting his suggestion. Stefan Holek puts it to the point in his post:

I have handed systems with a thin ZClass layer on top to semi-
developers and they were *easily* able to take it from there. These
are people who would never have grokked (and bothered with) disk-
based Python development and all the mumbo-jumbo it entails.

No other system has anything even remotely like this. People are
*blown away* by the power of building objects TTW (define some
properties, write a few scripts and templates, done!). Take that RoR,
Django, Vignette, Broadvision, …

Of course ZClasses have their limitations, but I fully agree that
this is first and foremost a documentation problem.

No action is taken so far, but Christopher Lozinski steps up to volunteer the ZClass maintenance. To be continued…

Releases

• Zope2.9.2 and Zope3.2.1 are released
• Nuxeo releases version 2 of its Calendar framework - a set of advanced, flexible calendar components for Python and Zope
• All zope.org CVS and Subversion checkins combined in a new mailinglist: Checkins - this list can be used to monitor all checkin activity on the zope.org software-development repositories
• httpgz is a Zope 3 package that performs gzip compression of responses

Sprints, Conference News & Press Announcements

ZF - Rob Page: “At long last the Zope Foundation is incorporated!”

Norwegian Archipelago Sprint April 2006 - plone.org
April, 23 to 29 - To start the development of the next, UI oriented, Plone 3.0 at a most amazing location, on a closed down military base on an island in the Oslo fjord, southern Norway.

Useful Links

• Jens Vagelpohl’s Testrunner Madness: “Between Zope 2.8 and 2.9 the test runner changed in various ways. Backwards compatibility was a stated goal, but so far it has not been reached. This document compares test runner invocations for the three simple scenarios that cover 99% of my own use cases.”
• Benji York’s Zope 3 Quick Start Guide has been updated for Zope3.2
• Zope Screencasts - zope.org now features its own collection of user contributed screencasts (zope2 and zope3, windows and linux, …)
• Universal Encoding Detector - character encoding auto-detection in Python brought to you by Mark Pilgrim
• Fredrik Lundh creates ((An Unofficial) Python Tutorial Wiki) - an editable copy of the standard Python tutorial (and an interesting experiment for 2006 anyway)
• DVCS Mini Roundup - Ian Bicking has a short look at Distributed VersionControlSystem products
• Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests.
• Anders Pearson: restclient 0.9.3 - REST client convenience library
• Scripting for the Semantic Web SFSW2006 - The aim of this year’s workshop is to showcase innovative Semantic Web applications relying on script languages and to give an overview about currently emerging Web 2.0 mashups and their interrelations with the Semantic Web

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