[Zope-Coders] hello, and introduction

[Martijn Faassen]

Hi folks,

As soon as I figure out what's up with the ssh-key business (I already mailed
a cry for help to the cvs master at cvs-admin@zope.org) I hope I'll (finally)
have the ability to do checkins. Yay! :)

So, I figured it might be a good idea to introduce myself to those of
you who don't know me yet. 

I'm Martijn (not the Other Martijn, but in case of confusion I listen to
MartijnF and even to Bob :). I've been active in the Zope community for
a couple of years now. I've been active in the Python community for a
bit longer, so some of the PythonLabs crew know me as well.

My areas of interest/activity in Zope land (excuse me as I ramble 
on for a while):

* Formulator

A Zope framework for creating web forms (and their validation backend).
Not in the Zope core, of course, but who knows, one day.

* Zope and XML

This is rather varied. I've played a lot with XMLDocument, the predecessor
of ParsedXML. On top of XMLDocument I built something called XMLWidgets,
which uses some wild pagan concepts related to some beliefs of the
Component New Religion. Widgets are objects that you could see as
'features' dynamically attached to DOM nodes. 

XMLWidgets can be used to write simple XML renderers using standard
Zope components such as DTML methods. I have also used it to create a
through-the-web semi-WYSIWYG authoring system for simple XML documents.  

More recently I've been working with ParsedXML; in fact I helped some
in the development, so I know that codebase rather well. I've also
been active integrating 4XPath so one can perform XPath queries against
ParsedXML's DOM. This appears to work, and I'll be releasing some code
soon. It is mostly an installation/compilation problem to get all
the dependencies (PyXML, 4Suite) going. The integration code is
rather simple.

The ParsedXML DOM wrapper implementation for DOM/Zope integration was
rather painfully slow, so I've recently rewritten this to be a lot faster.
I can now soon proceed to check in this new code. :)

I'm also trying to do something XMLWidgets-like with ParsedXML. This is
still in the design and experimentation phase currently, but it is
an important topic for me.

I'm also rather interested in doing something New Religion-like with
ZDOM; the DOM interface for Zope objects. A read-only ZDOM would give
us the ability to do XPath queries against Zope trees, which could be
quite powerful. XPath, as suggested somewhere in the ZPL docs, could
eventuall also become a TALES expression type.

I have a variety of other interests and experiences with the Zope
code base that I can't think of right now. We'll see what'll develop.

Regards,

Martijn