[Zope-Annce] The Zope News for August 31, 2001

Chris McDonough chrism@zope.com
Fri, 31 Aug 2001 01:15:30 -0400


The Zope News for August 31, 2001

by Chris McDonough (chrism@zope.com)

Also available via http://www.zope.org/Documentation/ZWN/ZWN-2001-08-31

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 paul@zope.com !

   Zope Corporation has established a mailing list to specifically
   discuss issues which arise when integrating Zope and various
   relational datbases -- zope-db@zope.org.  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

Zope@Zope.org Mail List Summary for August 18 - 31

   People can't get enough of drinking from the firehose that is the
   Zope@Zope.org 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:chrism@zope.com ).

   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


-- 
Chris McDonough                    Zope Corporation
http://www.zope.org             http://www.zope.com
"Killing hundreds of birds with thousands of stones"